It's fun to consider whether or not you chose your friends or whether they chose you, particularly when it seems you and your friends have nothing in common.
That's certainly true of Raissa and Jo, the protagonists of Dreamworks' newest film, but they are nonetheless determined to keep hold of one another, and have been since one fateful meeting outside the principal's office when they were kids--even as Raissa's looming departure for college across the seas threatens to tear them apart. The night before Raissa leaves, forces beyond their control draw Jo and Raissa to Nakali, the Forgotten Island from the stories Jo's grandmother told them as children. It's a dream come true.
But this island's magic is mysterious. Jo and Raissa wake up on the beach and realize they have approximately 12 hours unaccounted for. Moreover, they had a ticket home, but its location is buried somewhere in that time gap, in memories lost. Trying to reclaim it before the clock runs out demands that Jo and Raissa strike alliances with many of the island's inhabitants. Many of them are eager to help, but not all the invested parties are being honest about their intentions, or what exactly happened the previous night. Many of them are malicious, like the Vampire beast, Manang, who prowls the island to enact vengeance against Jo and Raissa for an unremembered slight. Escaping her wrath, and returning home, is worth any cost, but that cost might just be a lifetime of memories and a friendship that crossed worlds.
H.E.R. and Liza Soberano both share a base DNA of energy and vivacity, but their specific values are unique and complimentary. Listening to their interplay is like downing a root beer float with just the right balance of both soda and vanilla goodness.
The Forgotten Island playground offers a lot in the way of adventure. The locals land somewhere between the patrons of Spirited Away and the cast of a Mario game, which gives this wonderland a sort of theme park level of spontaneity that I think will play well, and all depicted in such rich coloring. I don't know if this movie was more expensive than the average animated picture. If not, then Dreamworks has certainly been using their budget wisely.
I wish I could say I was as impressed with Jo and Raissa's tour guides. The girls spend about half of their island adventure carting around three man-children. Literally, one of them is a giant 200-year-old baby. Their exploits all stink of varying degrees of juvenilia, and all without really even capturing anything useful about male arrested development.
This also reflects in the film's humor, which was likewise too caffeinated. Someone must have told these guys that no situation couldn't be improved by seeing onomatopoeia's like "KA-BOOOOOSH!!!!!!!" spelled out in across the whole screen in giant red text, and they definitely took that to heart. I think this was specifically to give the film a more comic-book style, but in execution it just reminded me of much more grating animated works. This was my first sign that the movie, pleasant though it is, isn't quite the gamechanger I was expecting it to be.
The movie winds up being a little too ambitious, thematically. Its survey is kind of all over the place. Except in the broadest of strokes, very few of Raissa and Jo's mini-adventures echo their journey of discovering what it means to let go of or hold onto a person, or how in some ways, to do one is to do the other.
Jo and Raissa's situation catches onto some very specific things that are worth lingering on, like how friendship anxiety can sometimes appear like some kind of attachment disorder, and how a society without the tools to parse through that experience is deprived of something.
And yet for how broad the film spreads its search, it never really asked the most interesting questions about the viability of childhood friendships surviving the transition to adulthood. Are Jo and Raissa even going to like each other ten years from now? Maybe. There's perhaps a case to be made, and I'm confident enough in animation's capabilities to imagine that a film could make that case. Time and distance are the easy part, now more than ever. But the divergent evolution of identity? There's the real battle. Still, I guess the film thought that marshmallow pirates were just more interesting.
In this way the movie's not a failure, it's just a little more cookie-cutter than I think it wants to admit. And though my enthusiasm for the movie tracks a little behind what I was expecting, I remain grateful for the landscape in which a film like Forgotten Island can be made.
--The Professor
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