La Tortue Rouge (2016)

"La Tortue Rouge" (or "The Red Turtle") seems at first sight to be pretty much the same thing as the ambiental noise/music for stress relief/chillout moments. But as in the audio area there's a thin line here too between "effective" and "dry/boring"...

A man cast away on an island tries helplessly to leave it. Something destroys his raft over and over again. We find out that the "something" is a big red turtle, which ends up being his pair on the island. In actual human shape. That's the story.

The animation produced in co-operation with Studio Ghibli is silent, which contributes somehow to the effect mentioned above. And even if the Japanese side seems involved only in the technical area, the story has some specific fantasy elements as many other productions released by Myiazaki and co's studio. Not many, just as much as it needs. It's actually mostly about the turtle metamorphosis. From there, you can move beyond by yourself... If a turtle can be seen as a human being, maybe you can also see the island as an existence filled with issues that you want to get away of but you can't, maybe you can also see the escape route actually within the "island", maybe you can also see that staying on the "island" you can help others find a way out (light spoiler), and more metaphors like these... That's the strongest part of "Red Turtle", and sometimes it gets close to exceptional. The problem is that many times this is not that obvious, and trying to understand if there's something more complicated behind what you see on screen as something simple gets you lost...

Rating: 3 out of 5