The Red Turtle (2016)
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the film was something of a publishing event in animation circles before a frame had been widely seen. Ghibli's involvement was not merely a financing formality: producer Isao Takahata, the director behind Grave of the Fireflies and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, actively championed the project, and the studio's aesthetic fingerprints are visible throughout. The finished film ran to a lean 81 minutes, said nothing in any spoken language, and arrived at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, where it won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. Comparisons to myth, fable and even silent-era cinema followed it everywhere. That is a lot of expectation for any picture to carry, let alone a debut feature from a director whose previous work had been confined almost entirely to short films.
That director is Michael Dudok de Wit, a Dutch-born, London-based animator whose 2000 short Father and Daughter won the Academy Award and the BAFTA in the same year, a clean sweep that announced him as one of the most gifted short-form animators working anywhere. His style, spare, painterly and emotionally direct, made him a natural fit for a wordless feature, at least in theory. The source material here is original rather than adapted, a simple, almost elemental premise: a man is shipwrecked on a deserted island, encounters wildlife, and lives out the full arc of his existence in that one place. There are no named characters to speak of, and the credited voice cast, Tom Hudson, Baptiste Goy, Axel Devillers and Barbara Beretta, contribute environmental sounds and physical reactions rather than dialogue in any conventional sense. Laurent Perez del Mar's score carries much of the emotional weight the script chooses not to bear. Whether that is a burden the music can sustain is, rather pointedly, at the heart of the debate the film keeps generating.
Context matters here. Wordless or near-wordless storytelling has a long and genuinely honourable history, and this is not the first film to stake its reputation on the idea that images alone can do the work of language. The tradition runs through animation and documentary alike, from the purely visual fables of the European short-film circuit to more recent work such as Waiting for the Sea, which used sweeping natural landscapes to carry its narrative with comparable ambition. Isolation, too, is a recurring subject in world cinema, and The Island of Contenda offers an interesting companion piece in its study of a character defined entirely by their remote surroundings. The Red Turtle arrives, then, in a tradition that is well-established, and its makers were clearly aware of it. Whether awareness of a tradition is enough to guarantee success within it is another question entirely, and one that critics and audiences have answered very differently.
Michael Dudok de Wit’s 2016 animated feature The Red Turtle is an absolutely visually stunning piece of cinema. Every single character, background, and sweeping ocean scene is crafted with such loving, meticulous detail that it functions as a genuine visual spectacle. I found myself pausing just to admire the watercolour textures and the gentle, rhythmic movement of the tide. It is, without a doubt, a beautiful object to look at. However, I have to be brutally honest: for me, that is literally the only positive takeaway from the entire experience.
The film’s most celebrated stylistic choice (its complete lack of dialogue) is where the whole thing completely falls apart. I’m not inherently opposed to silent storytelling; look at a film like Flow, which also operates without a single spoken word but never feels like it needs it, because the visual narrative is so propulsive and clear. The Red Turtle, on the other hand, feels like it is actively missing dialogue. The silence here doesn't feel like a profound artistic statement; it feels like a void. You spend the runtime waiting for a character to express a thought or an emotion that the animation simply cannot convey on its own, leaving the narrative feeling hollow and frustratingly opaque.
This lack of narrative momentum makes the film’s modest 81-minute runtime feel extremely long. I’ll admit, I tried to watch this as a family film, hoping the gentle, nature-focused aesthetic would be a hit. It was a massive misjudgement. The picture did not capture the attention of either of my kids for more than five minutes before they were squirming and asking when something was actually going to happen. I can’t entirely blame them. When a story refuses to give you any verbal hooks or dynamic pacing to hold onto, it becomes a bit of a chore to sit through, regardless of how pretty the scenery is.
The Red Turtle is a curious, deeply flawed experiment that seems to mistake silence for depth. Dudok de Wit has clearly poured his soul into the aesthetic, but a film cannot survive on gorgeous backgrounds alone. It’s a visually spectacular, yet profoundly tedious watch that left me checking my watch long before the credits rolled.
The Red Turtle sits in an awkward space: celebrated by festival juries and animation scholars, but considerably less warmly received by those who went in hoping for a story to follow rather than an aesthetic to admire. That gap between critical reputation and lived experience is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, and it points to something genuinely unresolved about the film's ambitions. Dudok de Wit's mastery of the short form is not in question, and fans of his earlier work will find much that is consistent with it here. Those interested in how Japanese and European animation traditions have cross-pollinated might also find it illuminating alongside something like Akira, a very different beast but a useful marker for what Ghibli-adjacent production can achieve at feature length. The question the film never quite settles is whether a sustained absence of narrative can be a feature rather than a flaw. Sometimes a beautiful silence says everything. Sometimes it just says nothing.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2026-07-22
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Red Turtle (2016) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Studiocanal Presents Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
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Physical: Amazon US
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