THE RED TURTLE

The Academy Award-nominated “The Red Turtle,” from Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit, is a sweet,
surreal reverie of a film. The first non-Japanese feature to emerge from Studio Ghibli — home of such masters as Hayao
Miyazaki and his acolytes — this quiet meditation on humans’ relationship with nature hews to Ghibli’s core values of
exquisitely rendered visual images combined with gently ruminative sensibilities.
From its dramatic opening sequence, “The Red Turtle” presents viewers with an alternately frightening and
inviting universe, where a nameless man is seen tumbling through storm-tossed waves, later washing ashore on a deserted
island.
Foraging for fresh water and food, he establishes an arms-length respect for the island’s fauna, which include
troops of skittering crabs and the occasional sunning sea lion. When he encounters a giant red turtle, however, he embarks
on an altogether surprising relationship that tests the boundaries of interspecies understanding, and the notion of
anthropomorphism itself.
De Wit, commissioned by Ghibli to make “The Red Turtle” after he won an Oscar for his animated 2000 short
“Father and Daughter,” takes his time to unspool this story, which is all the more intriguing for being related completely
without dialogue.
With only waves and wind, insect noises and Laurent Perez Del Mar’s pretty, but sometimes insistent score to
guide them, spectators are plunged into the bygone glories of silent cinema, their senses awakened anew by the pleasure
of watching humans and animals moving through space — in this case, an island that becomes a character in itself, with
its buff-colored expanses of sand, its lush bamboo forests, its blue-green coastline and tidal pools and the mists and
morning hazes that envelop it like diaphanous blankets.
Film fans will detect nods to “The Black Stallion” and “Cast Away” during the film’s initial moments, as well as
to such cinematic fables as “The Secret of Roan Inish” later on, when the stranded hero finds an unlikely antidote to his
loneliness and isolation in the form of a dreamlike, shape-shifting presence.