Over 31 fruitful years, Studio Ghibli has cultivated an iconic house animation style, working off a distinctive, often hand-drawn foundation to tell timeless stories with a pointedly modern focus. Their films are nature-oriented even when not explicitly about nature itself, engaging an archetypally Japanese conflict of man struggling to come to terms with the non-human world, attempting to reconstitute a fragile balance that may never have existed in the first place. Helmed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, The Red Turtle represents their first project without a Japanese director, as well as their first co-production, working with Euro studio Wild Bunch to present a gently effective, environmentally-themed fable.
With the studio at a decisive transition point following the retirement of founder and creative head Hayao Miyazaki, this small film represents a return to core principles. While it’s become customary for Ghibli releases to arrive in America with a fair amount of flash behind them—dubbed into English by a variety of big-name Hollywood stars—this one scraps not only that aspect, but spoken language altogether. Centered on the travails of a nameless sailor marooned on a desert island, it opens as he’s tossed, soaked and bedraggled, out from the fury of a stormy sea. This rebirth leaves him alone on the idyllic speck of land, protruding diagonally from the water, occupied evenly by sand, stone and a verdant bamboo forest.
This neat division of elements, featuring bulbous patches of breadfruit in the forest portion, sets up a balanced scenario in which survival is not a major issue. This of course doesn’t stop the sailor from immediately planning his escape, tearing down bamboo stalks to build a makeshift raft. Yet considering the film’s Edenic slant, it’s obvious from his first attempt that leaving isn’t going to be so easy. Efforts at making it past the immediate shoreline are continually frustrated, each time sending him back to work in the forest, cutting down more and more bamboo. Doing so presents a direct human challenge to the perfect simplicity of the emerald isle’s storybook setting, a challenge eventually countered by its governing natural spirit. On a third attempt, the sailor discovers his rafts are being demolished by the advances of a particularly aggressive, shockingly red sea turtle, whose appearance transforms this Crusoe-style shipwreck story into something more mythological.
One of The Red Turtle’s best qualities is contained here, in its ability to shift gears from a process-focused survival parable into a supernatural meditation on human existence as a whole. The subtlety with which it affects this expansion is impressive, but also partially to the film’s detriment, as the restrained style and familiar themes make a less-than-staggering impression. While Ghibli spectacles like Princess Mononoke have built naturalistic allegories into monumental artistic achievements, this project serves more as a reaffirmation of house style than a bold new step forward. Still, this humble, gorgeously wrought work stands as an achievement in itself; the rare movie which takes into full account both nature’s immense beauty and its inherent capacity for destruction.
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