As the shipwrecked man at the heart of The Red Turtle opens his eyes to his new Eden-like home, this film, too, opens out to something sublime. Edmund Burke once wrote, “Once source of the sublime is infinity, infinity has the tendency to fill the mind with that delightful horror.” Our hero begins his journey by gazing into infinity stretching out before him – infinite time, infinite loneliness, but most importantly, infinite water.
The ocean has long since been a fascination for those under the spell of the sublime – its transcendental awe, its unforgiving ferocity. Here, in Michael Dudok De Wit’s gorgeously animated meditation on human’s relationship with nature, it transforms from a horrific leviathan to a divine haven, and then back again.
Our hero is nameless, we know neither his origin nor his planned destination, and he only speaks one word during the film. However, we embark with him on a spiritual journey that surpasses these conventions. His story is one of movements – into the immensity of nature, into the depths of himself, into the solace of delirium, and finally into love. But first, into the surrounding ocean as he tries to escape his island.
After fashioning a raft out of bamboo, he sails towards the horizon only to be violently thwarted by an unseen presence beneath the surface. A Sisyphean montage begins as we see him come back again and again with larger rafts only to be halted once more, by what we now learn is the eponymous red turtle. The film then ascends into the surreal. After the turtle is remorselessly left stranded on its back under the white hot sun, it transforms into a beautiful red haired woman. A magnificent cycle then ensues, from birth to death to re-birth via all the shining points of a lifetime.
Dudok De Wit is an astonishing visual storyteller. The action drifts in a simple fable-like quality. The ravishing colours of his animated world are so thriving that every frame says more than infinite words. Laurent Perez del Ma’s stunning symphonic score is the backdrop to this universal story, lifting countless moments into euphoria. The underwater scenes, in which the character’s intertwining bodies perform a majestic dance to a soaring operatic melody, are a joy to behold, equal to Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.
A new Studio Ghibli release is always likely to be one of the highlights of the cinematic calendar and this film is no different, surely destined to take its place amongst the studio’s most revered and loved. The final scene is, again, of infinity as the horizon shimmers in the distance. The cycle is complete but destined to begin again. The destination was never known but the journey was nothing short of sublime.
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