Movie review - The Red Turtle

Where animations are concerned, my personal preference often involves beautiful natural scenery and hyper realistic images, whether hand drawn or digitally generated, that seem to be the work of an artist. And it was with these elements that “The Red Turtle” became my first choice of a series of films offered by the “World Animation Festival in Summer” now in progress at the Cinematheque Passion.

The film is in fact a display of artistic pictures and images that look like those in real life. There are scenes of the undersea world, beach rocks the man climbs up and down, incoming and outgoing tides, sunrise and sunset as well as long straight trunks of bamboos in a rainforest. In fact, watching the film is an experience of browsing beautiful paintings in a moving panorama. And, as in almost all animations, especially a dialogue – free one, there are fantastic sound effects that bring the various scenes to life, such as the pattering of the rain, the roaring of the waves, the thundering of the tsunami, etc. In fact, with the eyes closed, the viewer could imagine himself enjoying the stunning performance of a brilliant orchestra.

Of course, I did not go to the cinema for the mere enjoyment of the paintings and music. The film does tell a story. It seems a survivor story in the beginning. The man, washed up onshore after a ship wreck, makes repeated attempts to build a raft with the hope of sailing out to the sea, but getting more agitated and frustrated each time the raft is battered and scattered into pieces by an unseen creature. The viewer would thus expect his continuous fight with the attacker until his final victory. But, unlike Robinson Crusoe, who succeeded in leaving the island eventually, our hero in the story spends the rest of his life there with the Red Turtle, the creature responsible for the destruction of the rafts, which has turned into a woman.

So we may consider this a magical realism story. There is unspeakable love between the couple. They somehow make me think of Adam and Eve as they are the only humans on the island. They get along so naturally with the other creatures that they seem to have become part of Nature and Wilderness themselves. The birth of a child makes no difference to their harmonious and peaceful life. As the child grows up, however, he gradually feels the call of the sea. And then the day comes. He bids his parents good-bye and swims out to the sea accompanied by a trio of red turtles. We are thus reminded that he is himself a red turtle. The story ends with the mother turtle also swimming back to the sea after the death of her husband in his old age.

The story is simple and with few dramatic elements. I am not even aware of a special message for the viewer to ponder. It may not be appealing to kids. However, I appreciate the feeling of comfort it affords, the kind of peaceful comfort I would enjoy while reading a novel, preferably on an island as peaceful as the one where the castaway had a romantic encounter with a turtle-turned woman.