The Red Turtle

Japanese animation masters Studio Ghibli have returned from their brief hiatus with a new feature in collaboration with Dutch director and illustrator Michaël Dudok de Wit. It has the simplest premise: a man is stranded on a desert island and for every time he tries to construct a raft and sail away his vessel is smashed to pieces by a large, red turtle.

The animation is completely at odds with the precise and much-loved Japanese anime for which Studio Ghibli is so revered. In fact drawing comparisons with any other Ghibli film seems almost pointless: colour, style, tone are worlds apart from, say, Ponyo or Spirited Away. The studio has strayed from this standard only a few times – My Neighbours the Yamadas and recently The Tale of Princess Kaguya – but you could still sort of tell it was them, unlike here. Which is not to say that The Red Turtle doesn’t match these dizzying heights of animation: its very simple faces and features set against the watercolour-wash backgrounds of vast seas and forests result in a beautiful tale of myth, transformation and survival.

There’s also an overwhelming spiritual element to The Red Turtle never usually present in a Ghibli feature. The turtle is a mythic guardian of the island, overseeing events from the surrounding water; it is both life and death, human and non-human, destroyer and preserver. It evokes the World Turtle from Hindu mythology, an animal of such potency and size that it is able to hold the Earth on its shell. The island, formed of one massive, sloping rock at its centre, even looks like a turtle. It’s this tide of religious and natural imagery, realised in very simple and slow details, which makes this film such a relaxing pleasure to watch. Dream scenes and hallucinations provide moments of wonder, and there are no spoken words, making it – as every myth should be – accessible to all. It’s turtles all the way down.