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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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