The Red Turtle | Little White Lies

The Red Turtle

26 May 2017 / Released: 26 May 2017

A floating bamboo and leaf structure in a serene turquoise sea, with sandy islands in the background.
A floating bamboo and leaf structure in a serene turquoise sea, with sandy islands in the background.
4

Anticipation.

Ghibli! Michaël Dukok de Wit! Together!!

4

Enjoyment.

A languorously paced, elegantly animated fable of life’s cyclicality.

4

In Retrospect.

One for the desert island films list.

There’s an eco­log­i­cal thread run­ning though this delight­ful ani­mat­ed fable from Stu­dio Ghibli.

In Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Tur­tle, a man ship­wrecked and alone on a desert island con­jures for him­self a com­pan­ion who falls some­where between mor­tal real­i­ty and imag­ined fan­ta­sy, and the two go on adven­tures togeth­er that come to define life – and death.

There must be some­thing in the mil­len­ni­al waters. For the bare bones plot of de Wit’s min­i­mal­ist ani­ma­tion (or min­ime) can also be dis­cerned in recent, oth­er­wise dif­fer­ent, live-action films like Robert Zemeck­is’ Cast Away and Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man, sug­gest­ing that here, strand­ed in our present age, exis­ten­tial ideas are afloat about the place of the indi­vid­ual in hos­tile nature and an unfor­giv­ing universe.

Faced with eco­log­i­cal threats, a shift from glob­al­i­sa­tion back to eco­nom­ic iso­la­tion­ism, and the atom­i­sa­tion of our lives in the dig­i­tal age, cin­e­ma is giv­ing us a time­ly reminder that the prin­ci­ple of no man is an island’ has once again become caught in the cur­rent. The tiny insu­lat­ed ecosys­tem in De Wit’s film is also a micro­cosm of 21st cen­tu­ry human experience.

After the suc­cess of his ani­mat­ed shorts The Monk and the Fish and Father and Daugh­ter, The Red Tur­tle is de Wit’s first fea­ture film. It is a co-pro­duc­tion with Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, and boasts Isao Taka­ha­ta (Grave of the Fire Flies, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya) as its artis­tic pro­duc­er, but nonethe­less its ani­ma­tion is a far cry from the stylised won­der­ment of Ghibli’s sim­i­lar­ly ocean­ic Ponyo from 2008.

For while here too a myth­ic mag­i­cal real­ism will even­tu­al­ly wash ashore, there is also real­ism of a more straight­for­ward kind, reflect­ed in the way the ani­ma­tion care­ful­ly observes the sub­tle shifts in weath­er and light on the island. Despite an increas­ing­ly fable-like turn of events, an almost doc­u­men­tary-like nat­u­ral­ism per­vades this film’s ani­mat­ed forms, all cal­i­brat­ed to dai­ly rhythms and lunar cycles.

The pro­tag­o­nist is a man first seen both lit­er­al­ly and metaphor­i­cal­ly lost at sea, tem­pest-tossed upon over­whelm­ing swells. He ends up on a small rocky atoll with bam­boo for­est, fresh­wa­ter pool and beach. Ini­tial­ly, his sole com­pa­ny is a curi­ous cho­rus of pet-like crabs. Our hero quick­ly gets the lie of the land, and deter­mines to make his escape. Yet every bam­boo raft that he fash­ions gets destroyed by some­thing mys­te­ri­ous in the sea. As an expres­sion of his frus­tra­tion and des­per­ate need for escape into a less lone­ly exis­tence, the man com­mits an act of cru­el vio­lence against the tit­u­lar crea­ture, only to wit­ness it not fade, but suf­fer a sea-change into some­thing rich and strange.

With no dia­logue beyond grunts and the occa­sion­al shout­ed Hey!’, events here are orches­trat­ed only by the sounds of the envi­ron­ment, Lau­rent Perez Del Mar’s score and by the beau­ti­ful imagery. It lends de Wit’s film an admirable back-to-basics puri­ty (in for­mal terms) that match­es the reduc­tion of its pro­tag­o­nist to the sim­plest sub­sis­tence. The result is a para­ble of Dar­win­ian drudgery and sur­vival­ist rou­tines that is every so often dis­rupt­ed by freak occur­rences of nature. The mag­ic of The Red Tur­tle ulti­mate­ly comes down to the mir­a­cle of organ­ic matter’s trans­for­ma­tive recy­cling. Life always finds a way, and death is always a part of that.

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