Director: Januel Mercado, Joel Crawford
Cast: H.E.R., Liza Soberano, Dave Franco, Jenny Slate, Manny Jacinto, Dolly De Leon, Jo Koy, Ronny Chieng, Lea Salonga
Screenplay: Januel Mercado, Joel Crawford
108 mins. Rated PG for animated sequences of scary action, language, rude humor, thematic elements, some violence and brief tobacco imagery.

Ever since Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks Animation has been redefining the blueprint of animated features, pulling away from the attempts at CGI realism and into a realm of beautiful vistas and lovingly crafted characters, mixing genres and styles, and frequently coming up with something completely different from any of us would expect. That’s true, to an extent, of their newest release, Forgotten Island. Unfortunately, the plot is overwrought and often frenetically overwritten to the point that it’s all-too-familiar story feels old by the midpoint.

Jo (H.E.R., The Color Purple) and Raissa (Liza Soberano, Lisa Frankenstein) have been friends since childhood, and they plan to be friends forever, raised on stories of the island of Nakali fed to them by Jo’s grandmother Lola (Dolly De Leon, Triangle of Sadness). While they plan to one day reach the mythical island, time passes and life moves on. Now, on their last night together before Raissa heads to America for college, the two friends find themselves on Nakali, but trading memories of their friendship may be the only way home.

I was struck early on by the amount of trust these two filmmakers placed in their audiences. There are some bits of extremely dark comedy peppered throughout the film, notably at the start, and I was taken aback by the way Januel Mercado and Joel Crawford treat their audiences, all of them, as equals. There’s been a need in recent years to water down difficult material by the belief that children just can’t handle it, and Forgotten Island doesn’t sidestep it at all, laying the material out for viewers and letting them find an access point. Young people are smarter, stronger, and able to intake material at this age, but many filmmakers tend to forget. Mercado and Crawford do not, letting the entirety of Jo and Raissa’s friendship be out on the table. The humor is not always so clever falling back too often on farts and diarrhea and just lots of loud screaming, but there are significantly smarter elements at play.

Early on, Jo praises Nakali by calling out “the pageantry, the spectacle, the gore!” and that’s a fair description of Forgotten Island’s greatest strength: stylistically, this is one of the most beautiful animated films of the decade, gorgeously crafted locales and a diverse group of zany characters weaving in and out of the narrative. Crawford and Mercado have infused the beauty and strangeness of Nakali with an absolute banger soundtrack of classic hits that never feel like nostalgia bait but are instead far more naturalistic in the personal story they are telling.

Oftentimes, the style behind the story is able to do a lot of heavy lifting, but with all the wonderful animation and some very relatable themes, why does Forgotten Island feel so hollow? There’s a lot of stuff happening and it’s often confused for plot development, but the narrative mostly squanders its fantasy take on The Hangover by spending far too much time rehashing the plot with a lot of loud obnoxious dialogue, and a bit of 4th Act Syndrome, bloating the obvious ending with a few unnecessary turns. A busy narrative is not necessarily a better one, and by the end, all the goodwill of the first half was unfortunately spent.

Forgotten Island has a lot going for it, and even if I was unimpressed with the story and some of the easier attempts at humor, this is a movie that treats the younger audience members as the smart and resilient viewers they are and meets them mostly at their level. It’s a stunningly visual tale that is a lot better than the marketing had me believe. It’s still bloated and too hyperactive and loud to get all of its points across, but there is a fanbase for this type of animated film that will absolutely treasure this film.

2½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe