MAF 2

The Red Turtle

The red turtle was my most anticipated movie of Manchester Animation Festival. As a long term Ghibli fan, I am usually impressed by all of their movies, and I was excited to see my 2nd Ghibli movie on the big screen. However, I was disappointed by what I saw. First however, let me get the positives out of the way so I can talk about why I was left disappointed. The movie was very visually pretty, the style and shadows all felt natural and they were always beautiful. The sound effects and music always felt atmospheric, and you always felt like you were there due to the atmosphere at the time.

Unfortunately, for me, they were the only positives for me. This movie rides the Ghibli name to success, but calling it "arstsy" is merely an excuse for mediocre. I have seen many people now giving this film highly positive reviews, but all of these reviews seem to make excuses for it, which is always a bad sign. This movie's story is pretty much non existent, for a disappointing ending. The whole story was disjointed, with no real point to anything that any character was doing. The movie was also about half an hour too long, clearly there was a conscious choice not to use voices, however this really let the film down, there could be a lot more of an interesting story, and a lot more understanding about the motivation of the character. I don't want to be purely negative about this movie, because I am glad I watched it, but it was altogether boring, and there is only so long you can look at the exact same setting for an hour and a half, where nothing happens constantly. I really feel like this movie is riding the Ghibli name with no real quality of it's own, this would have been much better suited to being a short film rather than a full length feature.