The Red Turtle tells the tale of a man trying to escape a desert island. Photograph: Studio Ghibli

The legendary Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli knows a thing or two about talent. Co-founded by the great auteur Hayao Miyazaki, the company is the home of classic films such as Spirited Away, Howls Moving Castle, My Neighbour Totoro and the Tale of the Princess Kaguya. But until the gorgeous Oscar-nominated feature The Red Turtle by Michael Dudok de Wit, Ghibli had never worked with a non-Japanese director.

It is not hard to see why Dutch animator Dudok de Wit caught the attention of a company that cherishes the traditional techniques of 2D, hand-drawn animation over the flashy computer-generated techniques favoured by many other animation studios. The Red Turtle is a work of profound simplicity and exquisite beauty. Although the films animation style is quite different to much of the Ghibli output, its themes a deeply spiritual examination of nature, magic and mystery chime perfectly with the companys ethos.

While The Red Turtle is Dudok de Wits first feature film, his gentle, elegantly sparse short films are considered to be masterpieces of the medium. Isao Takahata, co-founder of Studio Ghibli, was struck first by Dudok de Wits six-minute 1994 film the Monk and the Fish; he subsequently fell in love with the Oscar-winning meditation on mortality, Father and Daughter (2000). In 2004, Takahata and Dudok de Wit met at the Hiroshima international film festival, and in 2006, Dudok de Wit received a letter offering him what he later described as the once in a lifetime chance to make a feature film with Studio Ghibli.

The result of a collaboration, which afforded Dudok de Wit a creative freedom beyond what he could have hoped for, is a truly stunning film. Perhaps closest in tone to the mythic fantasy and fairytale quality of Takahatas the Tale of the Princess Kaguya, The Red Turtle is nonetheless very much its own beast. His Ghibli collaborators stressed that they didnt want Dudok de Wit to adapt his style to fit in with the distinctive Japanese sensibility of their usual productions. This was to be a European film, the idea and approach was Dudok de Wits to choose.

The story he decided to tell has more in common with the fairytales and Greek and Roman myths that he devoured as a child, than it does with the bombastic assault of much of contemporary animation.

The Red Turtle is the tale of a man who is stranded on a desert island during a storm. His desperate attempts to escape, by lashing together bamboo canes to form a raft, are repeatedly thwarted by some unseen undersea force that shatters his vessel. On his third attempt, the man comes face to face with his saboteur, a giant red turtle

What follows is an unquestioning acceptance of the enchantment and mystery of the natural world that is very reminiscent of the Tale of the Princess Kaguya, a film that tells of a perfect female child who is found inside a stalk of bamboo. But while the story of Kaguya unfolds within the restrictions of the Japanese court, The Red Turtle embraces the wild unpredictability of nature, in a story that combines quiet moments of intimacy with the intense savagery and drama of the natural world.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement is that the film does all this entirely without words. Dudok de Wit had originally intended to include a few lines of dialogue, but was persuaded not to by Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki. Its a bold decision that invests the films striking visual component with a potent magic. And visually, the film is a wonder.

The backgrounds were drawn using charcoal on paper, giving it a hand-hewn artisanal quality that works beautifully with the rough realities of the location. Dudok de Wit decided against the traditional palm-fringed island that has become a cinematic cliche. Instead, his island is unpredictable, with green glades smashed by furious and sudden storms.

This is not a film that hammers home a message; its more intriguing and elusive than that. But while there is no overt ecological agenda here, there is something that is both simple and powerful a reminder and a celebration of our spiritual connection to the natural world.

Read the original:

The Red Turtle: a moving meditation on our relationship with the ... - The Guardian