Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken

With our pals at Pixar making a sad of a habit of striking out both critically and commercially with their avowedly original, story-driven pictures (most recent example: Elemental), it leads us to turn our cynical gaze towards Dreamsworks for our feature animation fix, purveyors of the excellent How to Train Your Dragon saga, and the less-excellent Trolls movies.

Their new one, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, derives from a charming original concept, and is rather a different kettle of anthropomorphic sea life. It is a full-throated celebration of the matriarchy in which three generations of female kraken (the semi-mythical squid monster) place aside their personal differences to deal with an uprising by a band of evil mermaids.

By a strange quirk, Ruby and her family possess the ability to disguise themselves as humans, and despite the fact their skin is blue, their friends and colleagues don’t appear to bat an eyelid. And if anyone does ask, just say you’re from Canada. It deals, directly and indirectly, with teenage growing pains and fairytale lore, recalling at points the ultimate teen high school blow-out, Carrie, but also the gently operatic pre-teen love story of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo.

Drawing on the social-sexual minefield that is high school, with the looming shadow of prom on the horizon, the film sees gawky, turtle-necked ​“mathlete” Ruby (snappily voiced by Lana Condor) plucking up the courage to ask frizz-haired skater boi Connor (Jaboukie Young-White) to prom. A glitter cannon snafu sends Connor flying into the sea, and Ruby must stump up the courage to save him, despite the fact she’s under strict instructions from her mother Agatha (Toni Collette) to never come into contact with salt water, lest she turn back into a giant kraken.

From there, the story sees Ruby discovering an undersea life that’s been assiduously hidden from her while also weighing up the pros and cons of family, school, her squad and the nervy antics that come with pairing off and petting. It’s not the most original proposition, and the relative thinness of the material is emphasised by a glut of pop music montages in which Ruby swims around really quickly. There’s also a ​“plot twist” that the majority of viewers over the age of four will have seen from many, many miles off.

Much like Ruby’s own ultra-bendy physique, Pam Brady’s screenplay is a little all over the place, and there’s a sense that too much is being packed into a relatively short runtime. That said, the setting and characters are delightful, as is the design of the shoreline town of Oceanside where the colourful, geometric buildings are all fashioned from shipping crates and other nautical paraphernalia. The voice work is strong across the board, with special mention going to Jane Fonda as regal kraken, Grandmama.

It’s such a lovely set-up, you wish the filmmakers had attempted to do a little more with it. Maybe if this does Mario money, we’ll get to see some more adventures teen kraken adventures. They would be welcome.

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