Review: ‘The Red Turtle,’ a film by Michaël Dudok de Wit

The Red Turtle looks and feels like a landmark achievement in animation, and following it’s Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature earlier this week it has been framed as such. In many respects, it is. The debut directorial feature from Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit (who won an Oscar for his 2000 animated short Father and Daughter) is the first non-Japanese film to be produced by the venerable Studio Ghibli. It’s a daring, striking, minimalist work packed with dazzling imagery. To watch The Red Turtle is to be immersed in a lush world that audiences have never seen before. I just wish I felt something greater than an overall awe for the visuals while watching it.

It’s a simple, wordless tale of a man shipwrecked on a deserted, uninhabited tropical island. The opening sequence shows the man tossed about amid highly detailed storm surges beneath a charcoal gray sky. When he arrives on the island and begins exploring his new home, he’s dwarfed by the equally detailed enormity of the beaches and jungle trees surrounding him. As a depiction of a man placed in an overwhelming, Crusoe-esque situation, the animation on display in The Red Turtle is unparalleled. There’s a sense of danger, uncertainty, and mortality in these opening sequences, even in such seemingly stock moments as watching the nameless man trying in vain to build a lifeboat from downed trees on the island. The Red Turtle takes scenes that audiences might have seen before, and turns them into something gorgeous and new.

One of the biggest impediments to the man’s journey off the island is a rather large turtle that seemingly sabotages any and all escape attempts. At first, the push and pull between the man and the titular reptile stands as a simple, but pointed metaphor regarding humanity’s tenuous relationship to the natural world, but after about thirty minutes The Red Turtle becomes an entirely different sort of film; one where the central metaphor becomes muddied and eventually set aside until the end. I’m loathe to spoil the big twist or deviation that The Red Turtle takes, even though it happens so early in the film (and I’m sure that many before me have even given away), but instead of feeling enticed by this new direction, I felt shoved away by it.

I’m sure that plenty of people will find de Wit’s sudden change a signifier of a better story that takes shape instead of the tried and true narrative that’s established in the early going here, but it’s predicated on a moment that’s more artful than sensible or logical. The twist, when it occurs, requires a massive leap of faith on the part of the viewer, and it was one that given the stark reality of the film’s opening, I wasn’t equipped or prepared to take. It’s also a twist that isn’t given enough time to fully sink it. It’s the equivalent of reading one book and then having someone slap it out of your hand, shoving a different volume of literature in your face and telling you to read that instead.

I understand that not all films that traffic in ethereal matters or metaphor are problems that somehow need to be solved, but The Red Turtle is the kind of effort that wants the viewer to theorize about what might have happened. In order for that to work, you have to buy into the premise, and it’s something that once the twist hits, I was never able to do. Every theory that I came up with was somehow laughable to me, and none of them moved me to deeper thought. I have no problem wrestling with films that are labelled as “difficult” or “inscrutable.” Two of my favourite working filmmakers in the world today are Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Denis Côté, but any film has to make me want to ponder something I find worthy of pondering. It’s not that The Red Turtle gives me too little to go on, but that it gives me too much in a way where I feel like I’m being goaded into talking about the self-importance of the work itself. It’s not that I don’t “get it,” but that there’s too much to get and most of it feels tossed off to me.

The three star review feels appropriate to me here, as I don’t dislike the film on the whole. I do apologize for dancing around the twist that many of my objections hinge upon, but de Wit has made a film meant to be experienced rather than dictated to someone, and I will adhere to those noble wishes. I also apologize that this review has become my own personal search for meaning in the material, but I also think that The Red Turtle is ultimately a search for meaning itself. That’s a brave filmmaking decision, and it shouldn’t be discounted.

Despite how cold The Red Turtle leaves me, it remains one of the most stunning works on animation in recent memory. I thought more about the technique and the brushstrokes that went into it than I did the story. I don’t think that’s the intent. Having said that, plenty of people I know see great worth in this and have tried ceaselessly to explain to me how they read the film. On some level, readings of The Red Turtle interest me more than the film itself. As a calculated series of images, The Red Turtle is an unequivocal success. As something meant to evoke a sense of rapture or stimulate an intellectual response, I sincerely hope you have better luck with this than I did.

The Red Turtle opens on January 27, 2017 at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and at theatres in Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Quebec City, Ste-Adele, Laval, Boucherville. It opens at ByTowne Cinema in Ottawa on February 3.

Check out the trailer for The Red Turtle: