Apparently I haven’t learned my lesson from Grave of the Fireflies and The Tale of Princess Kaguya when it comes to watching films with Isao Takahata‘s name attached to it, because ouch. The Red Turtle is a French-Belgian-Japanese animated feature directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit and is a collaboration between no less than seven production companies, but is primarily the co-work of Wild Bunch and Studio Ghibli. Ghibli is, to no-one’s surprise, my main reason for wanting to see The Red Turtle, since the quality and standard of the films they produce or co-produce are always top-notch, and this definitely didn’t disappoint.
Sparse if not completely free of dialogue, the film tells the story of a nameless man who becomes stranded on a deserted island following a massive storm. Though he tries to escape several times, all of his attempts are thwarted by the interventions of a massive – you guessed it – red turtle. This happens fairly early on in the film and is all I’m willing to divulge about the plot, to be honest – this is one of those films that it’s better to go in with a blank slate and no knowledge of the story. However, it’s a film I would definitely recommend to all fans of animation. Beautifully executed, the art style for the film is a nicely done combination of primarily French/Belgian-style animation and CGI (the former in the character animation and the latter in the natural surroundings of the island as well as for the eponymous red turtle). The palette for the film is warm and bright, and there’s a real tactility to the backgrounds, which still have the grain and texture of the paper it was probably painted on. There may or may not have been some rotoscoping used during production – there’s a sort of subtlety to the human movements of the film that seem to suggest so.
Though the semi-Castaway-like premise of the film would suggest a healthy dose of existential angst and pseudo-horror, The Red Turtle thankfully shies away from that and instead spends a fair amount of time all but pointing at the natural surroundings of the film saying “look how pretty this is!!”, a conclusion our principal character also comes to over time. Though there is an underlying sadness to the film (as well as to the story’s key disaster moment and the film’s ending), there are moments of innocent and lighthearted comedy (mostly in the presence of the small crabs inhabiting and island), and there exists a kind of open-ended hopefulness to the film’s close as well that I can’t quite describe. It makes a difference from other Takahata films in any case, which have, in the past, either torn my beating heart from my chest and thrown it on the floor or otherwise left me horrified, but the familiar bittersweet touch he has to his films is definitely present in The Red Turtle. Still not without some questions left unanswered (probably deliberately, but still), overall The Red Turtle is a quiet, simple and beautiful tale about a man opposing and then coming together with the nature that stranded and then healed him.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Other screenings of The Red Turtle at the Wellington NZIFF are:
• Sat 30 July, 4:15PM @ Lighthouse Petone
• Sun 31 July, 1PM @ Roxy Cinema
• Wed 3 August, 6:15PM @ Penthouse Cinema
• Sun 7 August, 1:30PM @ Embassy Theatre
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