Prudent For The Sound Of Silence

Following on from Hayao Miyzaki’s directorial bow with his film of The Wind Rises in 2013 to the the famed studio’s visualised  swan song of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There of last year, it looked as though Japan’s highly praised Studio Ghibli had run it’s creative course. Indeed, with Toshio Suzuki announcing that the famed studio would take a “brief pause” in the wake of Miyazaki’s retirement, the Japanese animated film industry hasn’t reached the acclaimed heights as it once did. With aspiring animators like Mokoto Shinkai, who crafted the beautifully stimulating Your Name, just recently taking the Japanese animation helm and Western animation, in particularly the Disney strain, churning-out features that are ever-improving in relation to animation styles, it’s fair to say that the Japanese animated filmic industry is currently facing a time change and renewal. Having said this however, considering that many devoted Western Otaku’s purposefully seek the latest entertainment of the Eastern world, while their acclaimed animated auteurs are no longer in the cinematic spotlight, the unveiling of Ghibli’s new intricate pearl of The Red Turtle, shown at last years Cannes Film Festival, has many critics and audiences heads turning due to it’s overall differentiation in style. With it simply being a Japanese-French-Belgian co-production (a first for Ghibli) which was supervised by Suzuki himself, The Red Turtle is an ambitious east-meets-west animated endeavour that assimilates a splendour of contextual themes and brings about curious questions of Ghibli’s uncharted future…

Echoing and amalgamating the story formalities of Robinson Crusoe and the surrealist nature of cinema’s early days, The Red Turtle tells the story of a man who is shipwrecked on a deserted island; marooned with sandy beaches, timid animal inhabitants and a slender but graceful swaying bamboo forest. Alone, famished yet determined to break free from this Eden-esque landscape, the stranded sailor builds a series of rafts; each of which is scuppered by a vast sea-beast. After vengefully overturning this wondrous creature on the shore, the forsaken man experiences feelings of remorse; prompting a miraculous empathetic transformation. Just as the goldfish in Miyazaki’s fable Ponyo turns seamlessly into a young girl, so the shell of this turtle falls away to reveal something that is equally astonishing and mysterious; reminiscent of folklore thrilled Irish animation of Song of the Sea…

To delve more into the confides of this magical symphony of visualisation for you, the readers, would be criminal for sure. However, with U.K. based Dutch animator of Michaël Dudok de wit taking the directing chair, who previously won an Oscar in 2000 for his short piece of Father and Daughter, not only does The Red Turtle assemble exquisite artistry that cleverly and seamlessly amalgamates surreal and realistic detail, but it boasts a superlative simplicity that unifies complex sub-elements into a singular and distinct sound and voice. In working with co-writer Pascale Ferran, De Wit conjures up a rather familiar concept that inquisitively combines Ghibli’s ecological thematics with a narrative attuned to known Western sensibilities and ideals seen within the inception of cinema itself. As much as it echoes similar tales of washed-up shipwrecked people looking for a way to find ‘freedom’, as seen noticeably in J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, The Red Turtle doesn’t hesitate in implementing a surrealist bravado that subtly assimilates religious connotations and profoundly references the surrealist dadaist-age of cinema’s early age. Indeed, as the landscape of the island consistently turns into a charcoal-looking monochrome aesthetic in which haunting dream sequences appear in mystifying splendour, with either a turtle ascending into the night’s sky or a musical ensemble of violinists eerily playing to the lonely man’s disarray, it’s hard not to notice the precocious little filmic-inklings of George Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon or even, more specifically, Salvador Dali’s Disney animated-short of Destino; a 6 minute wordless animation that funnily includes tortoises’ and catches our eyes perception with blaring surreal scenery, much like in this film.Along with the noticeable norm of Ghibli pursuing and persisting in utilising in naturalistic motifs that attempt to make us wary of the problems that surround our daily lives, what is more potent in comparison is the oblivious visceral realism of not only the carnivorous island in which spiders eat insects that feed upon dead fish and where birds prey on crabs that collect carrion from the shores that is depicted throughout, but also the verisimilitude of the characters and much human emotion is conveyed just as how heavily nature dominates the screen-space. the characters shown talk without speaking. They know the feelings of one another by their intricate mannerisms and how they look at one another through subtle yet realistic facial expressions. As The Red Turtle envelops itself ornate artistry, the audience doesn’t need to hear the words to know what is going on and what the characters are trying to interpret. In comparison to Ghibli films of the past, it may not be as highly-detailed as the elaborate Howl’s Moving Castle that hallmarks many different Victorian designs and contextuality’s, but De wit paves towards the human-side of things that propels our perspective to the vivid space presented.

A powerful form of communication in itself, film, throughout the many different periods and movements, has been used throughout its history to spread messages and ideas across the world; conversing with audiences through sound and image. Whereas we’ve become accustomed to the norm of sound and how much it helps us identify with certain specific things however, it can’t be underestimated how much a soundless piece of work can equally portray insightful meanings and ideas. Moreover, silent cinema’s dominant nature resides in displaying something that is universally accepted; unlike the implications of sound which discretely places certain things in genre specifics modes. This is indeed the case with this animated feature of The Red Turtle which proudly demonstrates the significance of soundless film in an impactful manner. From the opening sequences of the film, in which we witness a battered soundless man complexed over this environment that evokes imagination through grey-scaled nights to the porous greens, luminous blues and orange light of the day, it’s clear that The Red Turtle is an instinctive animated feature that is universal to all demographics. Whereas children from small ages will be ensnared by the wonderment of the abstract colours that the narrative takes place in, older audiences, like myself, will be embroiled by it’s differentiating and distinctive grandeur. It may be wordless, but it begets sounds that consistently remain. Instead of human figures speaking, with only the characters shown gesturing noises of joy or discomfort, nature speaks alternatively; with swaying tree’s brushing against the fluctuating wind and ocean waves tumbling in rhythm upon the shore. Accompanied by the musical cues scored by Laurent Perez del mar, the amalgamation of woodwind and bamboo percussion perfectly complement the sounds made and the minimalist visuals; urging on the contradictory nature of the man’s conflicting feelings and encompass themes of longing and anguish, despair and delight, love and death. The very act that we get to hear continuous background noises of individuals moving amongst the tallor the preternatural buzz of cicadas dancing through the array of many different tree’s further gestalts this continually thematic notion of the environment that Ghibli films have predominately and proudly shown in their past films. Besides this however, with The Red Turtle being a standout animation in recent years for simply being a feature that doesn’t involve a line of dialogue whatsoever, it makes you wonder why Ghibli themselves, in collaborating to make a picture like this, can’t be bold enough to venture into different material. In already crossing over their artistic-mastery towards the video-gaming world with Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, it makes sense of Suzuki and Ghibli to delve into a different source that would make themselves standout from the rest again. I mean, being that recently Nintendo creative mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto indicated the said video-game company was looking to get back into the feature-film business, wouldn’t it be a dream for animation and game lovers to see Ghibli take-on something like a Zelda-orientated film? One can hope and dream for that to come true. 

Sweeping that from one side however, with the film seamlessly combining analogue and digital animation, De wit doesn’t hesitate in emitting a visual symphony within The Red Turtle that seems to comprise a history of cinema itself. In combining surreal and realistic formalities, every frame of either the whale-shaped island or the vibrant blue sea is detailed and expressive beyond measure. Everything  from the way in which the light on the island greenery positively glows to the visual play that happens between the sun and shadows undeniably convey the emotions of the characters present; a contextualised idea that isn’t necessarily used in animation in this day and age. As it does instil simplistic yet contrasting eloquence that is a rarity to notice in the large confinement of animated features in this ever-changing cinematic era, one inevitable query that seems to crop-up in relation to Ghibli is what the future holds for their uncertain path. The very fact that this Ghibli-related animated picture involves an animation style that is equally as vibrant and visually majestic as something seen in Spirited Away, it does indeed churn out curiosity over Ghibli’s unforeseeable future and how they could potentially go down a route which see’s them collaborating with other aspiring companies to flesh-out animation styles that many cinema-goers aren’t used to normally seeing. As highlighted in the introduction to this review however, with Hayao Miyazaki recently emerging and making his directing-presence known once again that he’ll be coming back to finish-off the animated short of Boro the Caterpillar for the Studio Ghibli Museum and past Ghibli animators going off on their own to establish the newly risen production company of Studio Ponoc, which looks set to inhabit familiar Ghibli animated traits as seen in the teaser for the said studios first feature for Mary and the Witch’s Flower, it’s hard to fathom what the near-future holds for Ghibli. With animation changing yearly, it’ll be intersting to see where Ghibli will be placed amongst not only the newly-risen competition within the inspired Japanese animators, but also how they’ll stand in contrast with the dominant space that Western animation takes hold of.  

Aside the uncertainty and really unrelated speculation, Michaël Dudok de wit’s superlatively visionary filmic piece of The Red Turtle is a wonderment to perceive and it’s no surprise this different Ghibli-associated picture got a nod for Best Animated Feature in the preceding Academy Awards. Through it’s commendable virtue of cementing a simplistic context that throws surreal complexities, as shown through the apparent yet effective silence of the structure, there’s no mistaking that this latest Ghibli picture could stand to be significant change of means. Is it as impactful or meaningful as the beautifully swept swan-song of When Marnie Was There? No. However, what it brings in comparison with the vast array of different animations, is its underappreciated universal appeal and the instinctive art style it opts for. Maybe The Red Turtle does signify Ghibli’s changing motivations in perhaps partnering with different animators, maybe it doesn’t. What we do know however, is that Studio Ghibli, through seeing this specific film, remains to be one of the remaining production companies to purposefully strive to touch the true essence of cinema…

On that note, it’s time for to end this week’s review. As always everyone, thank you for reading my latest film review of The Red Turtle and I hope you’ve all enjoyed the read!! 😉🐢 If anyone has an opinion on either my review or on the film itself, feel free to drop a comment down below. Next week, I’ll bring you another film review in the form of either Alien: Covenant or Free Fire, a film that I’ve been meaning to review for quite some time now 😑…Once again, thank you to everyone for reading this week’s Blog Post, and I’ll see you all next week!! Have a nice weekend!! Adieu!! 😁😎✌

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ – Alex Rabbitte