The Red Turtle Completely Free of Dialogue

The Red Turtle is a 2016 French-Belgian-Japanese animated fantasy drama film. The film was directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit and produced by Toshio Suzuki from Japan. The film tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on a deserted island and meets a giant red female turtle.

The film has no dialogue. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film for the 89th Academy Awards. Through the story of a man shipwrecked on a tropical island inhabited by turtles, crabs and birds, The Red Turtle recounts the milestones in the life of a human being.

"The Red Turtle" is one of those rare animated movies that transports you to a different setting without demanding that you focus on narrative or character development. Instead, viewers are encouraged to fall in love with an environment, specifically a small tropical island on which a nondescript, mute castaway inexplicably finds himself shipwrecked. This focus on setting over narrative is crucial since "The Red Turtle" follows the normalization of one man's romance with nature. Because this is a fable, the above-mentioned romance is quite literal: our nameless castaway falls in love with a shapeshifting turtle that transforms into a beautiful naked woman. He also inevitably stops trying to escape his surroundings, and starts to build a home on the island. The dialogue-free drama shows a dead red turtle transforms into a human woman, who becomes the mate of the very man who caused the turtle's death.

 The screenplay was written by Dudok de Wit and Pascale Ferran. Studio Ghibli’s first non-Japanese production also marks the feature film debut of Dutch-British illustrator and animator Michael Dudok de Wit, an Oscar winner for the 2000 short Father and Daughter. The main difference between this type of story and the one that "The Red Turtle" eventually becomes is that there's always something that's entreating or trying to catch the viewer's eye, whether it's blessedly un-anthropomorophosized crabs, or a forest of gently swaying bamboo shoots. The Red Turtle received critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 94% score based on 107 reviews, with an average of 8.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads,

"The Red Turtle adds to Studio Ghibli's estimable legacy with a beautifully animated effort whose deceptively simple story boasts narrative layers as richly absorbing as its lovely visuals #10 Best Movie of 2017 #70 Most Discussed Movie of 2017 #86 Most Shared Movie of 2017