Forgotten Island (Sept 29)

I don’t have a lot of ways of describing this movie without comparing it to KPOP Demon Hunters, which is to say that both movies are smart, culturally ambidextrous love letters to being a teenage girl with amazing soundtracks and a bunch of great twists and turns. Prima leaned over the monsters to whisper between almost two hours of solid laughter to describe this as just animated Dude Where’s My Car, which I’d never seen before, but instantly couldn’t unsee. There’s a lot of things that are working in this movie, so I’m just going to beg you to go see it and then come back for discussion after the jump for spoilers.

FI is pretty exceptional in the way that it commits to deepening the lore of any specific location it tells a story. We spend a lot more time in Manila building the stakes than I think anyone expects from the trailer: from the graduation party antics (shoutout to animated Jesus in Dreamworks! shoutout to bestie’s parents not being hostile to Jo just because she seemingly is the author of a lot of shenanigans that implicate their daughter Raissa! shoutout to another standout animated grandma!). And then once we’re in the mythical world of the Forgotten Island, we dig pretty deep into a whole cast that could’ve been a collection of one-liners but really becomes a fully fleshed out ensemble from top to bottom.

We don’t have to get all New Yorker about it, but Parul Sehgal did write a banging essay about this a few years back called the Case Against the Trauma Plot in which she talks about the dangers of amnesia and Swiss cheese memory plots becoming the dominant form of storytelling in contemporary literature, the inclination to make everything a Freudian jumpscare held until the very final act, but that’s really not what Forgotten Island is all about. When we do get “memories” explained, it is Odyssean in its completeness, ripe for disagreement, and rich in characterization. There are entire moments that are alluded to and withheld until the third act, Avengers musical-style in Hawkeye, and then fully imagined as if they were a full scene meant to be experienced in real-time in the original chronology of the story, not necessarily a missing jigsaw piece that will complete the final sequence in an essential algorithm to solve the movie. Callbacks, allusions to events we haven’t seen, even just little things like Predator gags that build on each other, are all little Easter eggs that the story weaves into its structure.

The cast of villains is great (I count at least four?) and it’s fun that the movie gave space for Jo and Raissa to have separate moments for and types of heroism in the course of the story. I even love the way that certain jokes are left without comment, like the nipple ring or the destruction of fairy culture. Cannot speak more highly about a movie that features lumpia so prominently.