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The Weird, Bombastic Memories of Forgotten Island

American studio animation has felt quite safe as of late -DreamWorks movies especially. Consistent and reliable brands are maintained or else original movies that follow very tried and true formulas. It’s not always a bad thing -some really strong and meaningful storytelling came out of the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon sequels. And The Wild Robot did some pretty stellar things within its standard narrative. But there’s not typically the same kinds of ambition or thematic innovation to these movies as you might find in animated works from other countries -and that is true even if the animated work is about another country. Pinpointing a culture and compressing it into a movie is another popular trend of mainstream animation lately -the trope that resulted in Moana, Coco, Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto among others. Good movies (most of them), but always just a little distant and inauthentic. You can feel the narrative, tonal, and thematic strictures upon them that keep them safe and palatable for American executives, and occasionally the audience too.
This is all a long way of saying that DreamWorks’s new adventure-comedy Forgotten Island is a perfectly decent movie, and genuinely quite impressive in some regards, but it perhaps hides such tendencies less well than its peers, or else its execution just prompted me to think of these things more strongly. It doesn't pander exactly, but the unique, personal tenor it supposedly means to strike -purportedly it is inspired by the friendship of directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado- doesn't stick out among structural and thematic obligations that feel foisted upon it.
The movie centres on Jo (voiced by H.E.R.), a Philippine girl recently out of school grappling with the impending departure of her childhood best friend Raissa (Liza Soberano) for Caltech in the U.S. Raissa had always been more of an academic while Jo, despite some artistic and performance talent, is a classic underachiever -yet the two have maintained an incredibly tight bond strengthened in part by their mutual love for the aesthetics and storytelling of Philippine folklore and especially a mythological forgotten island called Nakali spoken of with reverence by Jo's grandmother (Dolly de Leon). On the eve of Raissa's flight, the pair discover a portal to Nakali and leap through. However, when they awaken on the beach of this magical new world, it is a full twelve hours later and there are various clues to raucous activities and events they have no memory of. With the help of a rowdy were-dog called Raww (Dave Franco), they work to retrace their steps and figure out a way home.
This is the very fun stuff in the movie, when it is playing out a magical island version of The Hangover and allowing the characters a wide berth of silliness in which you can see their chemistry in action. It is a very palpable chemistry, in both the animation and vocal performances, lending a sense of authenticity to their relationship. Even as Raissa is the straighter of the two, they are both very weird girls with matching energies of curiosity, enthusiasm, and trouble, if Jo is defined by a lot more impulsiveness than her companion. This sensibility is the driving force of the movie's tone, as their journey through the various strange corners of this world, all based in some part on aspects or entities of Philippine spirituality, abound in a lot of the same hectic pace and vivacious humour, the explanations for Raissa's singed-off hair or Jo's crown, or most notably the pair of cognizant wings clasped tightly on Raissa's shoulders each offbeat and satisfying in their own ways.
It is the animation that is the key to that effect though, and the wild and wacky tenor of the movie overall. The world and characters are generally designed quite well if to a bit of a standard aesthetic, but it is the visual language that aesthetic is presented within that keeps the movie engaging and propulsive. Not often does the role of the 'camera' play so strong a part in animation, but the way it moves and the unconventional angles are quite refreshing. So too is how changes in mood are expressed with regards to colour and composition. And of course there are plenty of little anime-style gags around particular over-the-top expressions and ideas. The generation making animated movies today is the first generation to have likely grown up on the anime explosion of the 90s, so I imagine it will be a tendency in movies for a while to come. Here it works okay, the whole visual style reflecting well the weird and goofy fashions of protagonists who will randomly dance-rap at each other for the hell of it while gorging on cheetos. And in the textures of the world itself it is very Asian in its colours, proportions, and archetypes.
The collection of archetypes who meet Jo and Raissa on their journey though are not the most enjoyable set of characters. Most of them in fact are a bit obnoxious. That includes Raww, who is invested with some degree of depth beyond his reckless party-boy attitude, but even he feels very one-dimensional, his sad background as in many a DreamWorks film a shadow of something done more competently by Disney. Apart from him, there is also Bungi (Manny Jacinto), a giant baby demon who is subject to exactly the kind of jokes you would expect of a baby (his is also quite an ugly design) and the doofus self-aggrandizing Mermahn (Kevin McCann), who is designed like a drag queen and wears talking starfish as nipple-coverings. There is also an army of small marshmallow-like Duwendes known for being cute, something the film tries as hard as it can (though not very creatively) to convince you of. It's good enough for Jo at least, who endangers herself and Raissa by hugging their king.
Jenny Slate meanwhile voices a character called Batiba, a Cheshire Cat who stores memories, and plays her in the same cadence she used in Zootopia, which should be a telling sign from her first appearance. Memory is the key theme of the film to both comedic and dramatic purpose -it is not just the girls’ silly adventures that are ascertained through their quest, but consequential actions for their relationship. The most significant of these plays out in a typical fashion to escalate conflict between Jo and Raissa -you get a sense where it is going from very early in the movie pertaining to Jo’s fear and insecurity about a future without her friend. When it comes to a boil it is tedious, but in light of that the movie does at least shift gears going into its climax in a curious way that puts some onus onto Raissa instead of Jo. And their friendship is allowed to be expressed from a different perspective. Stories that deal in the difficulty of a close bond in some meaningful way breaking apart can tend to dissect it from the vantage of the person being ‘left behind’. But a relationship such as this is a two-way street, and it is appreciated that Forgotten Island highlights the toll on the other side of the equation -doing so through an emphasis on the vitality of memory and the clarity of it. And as the movie transforms into an homage to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to get this point across it sheds the superficial and the the love story more directly comes into affecting focus.
A strictly platonic love story of course that the movie, without offering up a love interest for either, seems to go out of its way to emphasize (the script’s constant invocation of “best friend” against a lot of deep sentiments is a little suspect), but a tenderly rendered one at that. The underpinnings of it are derivative of other friendship-themed adventures, but the characters at least are not. Other aspects of the film’s resolution are a mite contrived -redeemed villains are especially a trope I’m tired of in animated films, and in this case especially given the scale and trauma of the crimes. But the movie is at least mature and even-handed in where it sends Jo and Raissa and the durability of their bond. The Philippine cultural components can feel a bit like shallow window dressing at times, and where they are bigger parts of the narrative in the comic relief sidekicks they can come off annoying. But the style of the film and its look, its weird heroines and their emotional journey are engaging enough on their own merits. Cynical though I may be to some of its patterns, it is not so forgettable an island.

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