THE RED TURTLE

Under a Fractured Turtle Shell

HAIKU AND ANTI-ROBINSONADE IN A BALLADE; AN AWARD-WINNING ANIMATED FILM ABOUT THE

MYSTERIES OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF MAN AND NATURE.

Already the fact of creation history provides a long-lasting place in the chronicles of animated film for
the animated feature film of Michael Dudok de Wit, titled The Red Turtle, which was completed in
2016, that the Japanese Ghibli studio supported the production of an animated film of a foreign – in
this case a European – director with the co-financing of the production for the first time. Moreover,
what people say is that Hayao Miyazaki contacted the artist, who won an Oscar with his short film
titled Father and Daughter, made in 2000, in a letter in order to offer the possibility of collaboration
with the Ghibli studio. The Dutch director, who had previously exclusively made only short films – and
who as an animator worked on feature films of a totally different nature, such as Heavy Metal, Fantasy
2000 or The Deluge – had spent close to a decade on the film born on request, on which, in addition
to Isao Takahata of Ghibli studio (The Grave of Fireflies), only a handful of colleagues collaborated.
French and Belgian support also contributed to the birth of the film, and it is especially joyful that the
staff of The Red Turtle was extended with Hungarian participants, as well: the drawing works (the
elaboration of the characters, the shadows and the effects) of more than fifty minutes, and the
colouring of the whole film is a result of the almost two-year activity of the artists of Kecskemétfilm,
the team led by Lajos Nagy. The Hungarian premiere took place at Otthon Cinema in Kecskemét – with
the director as a guest.
Of course, not only the creation history backdrop makes the showcasing of the animated film winning
a special prize in Cannes an extraordinary event. The Red Turtle, by keeping and at the same time
thinking further the most characteristic features of the short film animations of its director, points out
the issues and experiences of basic human existence with the help of a composition method that may
seem old-fashioned. Although The Red Turtle starts out as a regular Robinsonade – stormy sea waves
wash a man ashore on a deserted tropical island, in reality the film does not become an adventure
story putting the struggle for survival or the will to recreate a medium of civilization into the centre of
attention. This may be well illustrated by the parallels and opposites of the attempts made to leave
the island with the modern Robinsonade (Cast Away) of Robert Zemeckis. While the main character
played by Tom Hanks gets to the building of a raft making his escape possible only after several years,
and he gets out on the sea at the hiatus of the film, the anonymous shipwrecked man of the animated
film puts together his raft already at the start of the film, almost immediately after he is washed ashore
on the island – for his attempts to fail again and again, and for him to finally settle on the island
permanently. It also acts as a break from the Robinsonade traditions and against any kind of action-
centred dramaturgy that the introduction of self-sustainment, the getting of food, the “establishment
of a home” or the making of fire are actually omitted from the action, and these very emphasized
hardships of other Robinsonades only appear as marginal motifs (fishing is an almost banal thing, one
can sleep also in the grass or sand, and we do not know how our heroes make fire). The contrast is also
drastic compared to the Robinsonade-version offered by popular animation: Robinson Crusoe made
with also French-Belgian financing shown at the same year with the Dudok de Wit work is also not a
tradition-seeking interpretation of the base story, as the story of the title character unfolds from the
view of the small talking animals of the island world. It is true that The Red Turtle does not forget the
comical effect of animal actors, either, but the hermit-crabs edging around the main character are
mere silent companions, and they do not get a determinant role (even if their small group is hard to
forget). The kind CGI animation of Robinson Crusoe is true to stay within the limits of a children’s film,
while The Red Turtle without doubt targets an adult audience: the principles of its form and the
experiences moulded in it suggest a more mature audience.
In this sense The Red Turtle is an anti-Robinsonade of a kind, which instead of the world view of
adventure films enters into a kinship much more with the island film versions in which the island and
the events happening there tell of the human experience in an abstract way, and which amalgamate
emotional and spiritual experiences. From this view the most characteristic pre-vision of the Dudok de
Wit animation is the film of Kaneto Shindo titled The Bare Island of 1960, which became famous mainly
for that, although being a film with sound, dialogue still cannot be heard in it. The combination of the
island-theme and the avoidance of dialogue takes the stylisation principles of The Bare Island further
and re-evaluates them with the tools of animation; The Red Turtle connects to the tradition of this
animation with omitting of words and creates a pronounced (acoustic) world with the overvaluation
of the other components of this frequency – especially the noises and even silence (see Movie World
2011/9). The popping of the cork screwed out of the bottle on the shore can be considered such a
sound motif which reflects straight on this sound concept. With Dudok de Wit the lack of words is an
inherent part of pre-civilization (or post-civilization), purely natural state of being (we can only hear
unarticulated human voices, among others screams and giggling). The Red Turtle also evokes The Bare
Island in its narrative mode building on repetitions and omissions, but it also enriches the world of
events with enigmas that are almost from a fantasy world. As a result of this it is as if a ballade and a
haiku would have a rendezvous in the animated film – the experience material of The Red Turtle can
be also construed as a concentration of the “human nemesis”, from the symbolic birth (from getting
ashore), starting from the discovery of the environment, through finding a mate and the establishing
of a family, up to the inevitable break between the generations, and finally to the unavoidable passing.
The story, covering the widest spectrum of emotions and switching between crisis situations and calm
moments, and proposing numerous momentums with multiple meanings – especially regarding the
mysterious creature in the film’s title, guides us through a path of life.
The main character first gets to know the red turtle as a creature preventing his escape on several
occasions, and the animal goes through a magical, but an extraordinarily delicate transformation,
which happens at the blink of an eye, following her death – more precisely after the revenge of the
man: after the fractured turtle shell a redhaired woman appears, who later will be the mate and the
mother of the child of the main character. This is how the action takes us out of the hell or trap of
solitude and puts the emphasis over on the world of experiences of companionship and the
establishing of a family – evoking both biblical parallels (with a new Adam and Eve and a new Paradise)
and the love movie versions of the Robinsonade theme (Blue Lagoon). The Red Turtle manages to keep
itself away from being too emotional, like what can be associated with the latter – only the music used
in some series of images can be construed as “overbubbling” (at the depicting of some swimming or
imaginary levitating in the sea).
The lifestyle of the man’s family is two-sided not only because of the correlations of the animal-like
and the human characteristics (moreover, the double meaning is also emphasised – or rather inherited
– in the character of the child/youth); a two-sidedness of another kind also accompanies the whole
film. In the first half hour of The Red Turtle several hallucinations and illusions believed to be true, but
still dissolving as a dream, delude our hero (about flying, about the string quartet playing music on the
beach), and these mirages disappear from the chain of events right after the mysterious
transformation occurs. If it truly happens: because even the whole remaining part of the film could be
interpreted as imaginary and the product of a lonely mind about a mate, a child and decades spent
together. We can also witness a new transformation or rather retroversion at the death of the main
character; the ending however is not meant to dissolve the two-sidedness, but on the contrary: it
maintains it by letting the audience decide on the possible explanations and interpretations.
Despite all of these in The Red Turtle the double meanings arising from fantastical events or
hallucinational experiences are not the ones that are truly determining: the mysteries of the
relationship of man and nature are given a central role. This aspect also greatly influences the building
up of images, and at this point consistency is especially striking with the short films of the director –
primarily Father and Daughter, as well as The Monk and the Fish made in 1996. The ars poetica of
Dudok de Wit can be grasped by the notion of minimalism; the empty spaces and the large distances
which reduce the human characters to a tiny point, even to a grain of dust, get a significant role in all
of his works. This is also the case with The Red Turtle; plane sizes narrower than small total can only
be seen sparsely in it; fundamentally the spaces of the sea, the shore, the rocks, the forest or for that
matter the starry sky fill in most of the screen. Even the shadow of the human figures many times
occupy a larger part of the screen than they themselves (reflections and shadows are also special
visionary elements in the short films of the director), and their appearance reduced to a few strikes,
recalling the Hergé clean line style (the Tintin cartoons and animated films), creates an exciting contrast
with the detailed and realistic – and at the same time due to the grainy surfaces still stylised –
elaboration of the island environment.
Whether the omission of actions in the ordinary sense and the combination of the lack of human
speech and an image creation miniaturising the human characters can be conciliated with the full
feature film length without dissonance, that certainly could be debated. However, not that the
animated film of Michael Dudok de Wit is a unique result of contemporary motion picture culture, the
ethereal beauty of which leaves a lasting imprint on the soul.

THE RED TURTLE (La tortue rouge) - French-Belgian-Japanese animated film, 2016. Directed by:
Michael Dudok de Wit. Written by: Michael Dudok de Wit, Pascal Ferran. Music: Laurent Perez del
Mar. Producer: Isao Takahata. Producer: Prima Linea / Why Not / Studio Ghibli / Arte France Cinéma.
Distributor: Mozinet Ltd. 80 minutes.