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Is this a dream, a fairy tale, a hallucination, or simply a story told with elements of magic realism? It doesn’t demand our attention with a complicated narrative or character development. It’s quiet and maintains our attention with the beauty of its animation, the stillness becoming something of a lulling and hypnotizing strength like the sound of the wind and waves on the soundtrack.
What exactly is The Red Turtle about? Well, it’s mainly a mood piece about man’s conflict with nature slowly transitioning into his love and peaceful cohabitation with it. He begins the narrative as a desperate player, trying in vain multiple times to flee the deserted island he’s found himself stuck upon. Each attempt finds his makeshift raft destroyed by an unseen force, a force later revealed to be a giant red turtle. The man later finds the turtle on the beach, where he strikes it, flips it over, and leaves it to die before his guilt causes him to run back to check on the poor creature.
Then the weird stuff really starts. The turtle’s shell cracks and a beautiful red-headed woman appears. They eventually fall in love, have a child, and the film continually jumps ahead to little episodes in the rest of their lives. When the man finally dies in old age, the woman turns back into the red turtle and crawls back into the ocean. In-between, there’s scenes of the man’s various dreams where the dead turtle’s body takes flight or he flies across the waves towards a bridge that leads to civilization.
The Red Turtle begins life as a Robinson Crusoe-like adventure story of survival and escape, then becomes another one of Studio Ghibli’s near spiritual meditations of man’s need to commune with nature and find a way to live with it harmoniously. The transition between these story points is smoothly done so the leaps between them are carried off. We see that the invisible force keeping him on the island is merely a benign presence with a curiosity that causes inadvertent strife. This is the easiest story beat to grasp, it’s the transition into magic realism and romance that could trip most of us up.
Luckily, The Red Turtle does the sense of discovery remarkably well, and this helps immeasurably in getting us to buy into the ecological messaging. We witness the turtle’s presence at the same moment the man does, and we watch the magical transition along with him. It’s the constant daydreams and fantasy sequences that prep us for the eventual twist, and then the return to lulling quietness and stillness of the animation and story that helps keep it from flying off the rails. There’s a beguiling no-frills approach at major work here, and The Red Turtle’s power abounds in the ways it transfixes us into a quasi-dream state while the animation hammers home the mystery and power of the dynamics in the fable.
