datautisticgamer-74853 Review of The Red Turtle

The Red Turtle (2016)

A classic cinematic example of a double-edged sword

[7/10 · 10 February 2017]

Of course, having a dialogue-free film does come with its advantages, such as no subpar acting, but it does also hurt this film especially. To start with, the lack of dialogue, narration, or text of any sort makes for a rather confounding exposition, since we don't know where the father comes from, why he's out in the ocean, and so on. It presents us with many questions and leaves the answers to them completely ambiguous and up to our imaginations. While I can certainly condone wanting to imagine how a cliffhanger goes on, like how the son sets off on his own adventures, having too many of them along with a plot that is reliant on a creative audience had ended up overwhelming my brain. The dialogue, or lack thereof, also contributes to the characters having equivocal personalities, with the father being as lost as the audience potentially gets, the mother being sort of nature's forgiveness for being stranded on an inescapable island (at least by him) and the son being the explorer that the father was at the start. That's what I could identify from the characters based on how they interacted with each other and what they did, but without voices other than a few Legend of Zelda-esque calls and grunts, it's not clear. What I would recommend this film especially for is its animation. Studio Ghibli has proved time and time again that Japanese animation has been underestimated by the rest of the world for decades, and with them in particular, it seems that every film they get involved in has some sort of improvement (just like many Disney films, including the animation boost between Zootopia and Moana). Here, the rich tropical colors, the ability to animate water and the like without CGI, and the depiction of disasters like storms and tsunamis make it a sight for sore eyes. In a way, the method in which the animation is utilized allowed me to gain a better understanding of what was occurring contemporarily in the film, which is a great sign given how there otherwise doesn't seem to be an apparent plot, other than some familial chronology with a symbol. I say go for the animation, but don't expect much from other aspects of it. It simultaneously shows how beautiful films can be without dialogue as well as how obsolete the concept seems to a lot of our audiences.