The Red Turtle

The Red Turtle (La Tortue rouge; レッドタートル ある島の物語) is a 2016 animated fantasy drama film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit who co-wrote the film with French screenwriter Pascale Ferran. The film is an international co-production between Japanese anime company Studio Ghibli and several French companies, including Wild Bunch and Belvision. The film, which has no dialogue, tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and meets a giant red female turtle.

The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 69th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2016. The film was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film for the 89th Academy Awards.

Plot
A man set adrift by a storm wakes up on a beach. He discovers that he is on an uninhabited island with plenty of fresh water, fruit, and a dense bamboo forest. It is dominated by a smooth rock hill. After a few nights he begins to hallucinate, seeing a bridge to lead him offshore and later a string quartet playing on the beach. He builds a raft from bamboo and attempts to sail away, but his raft is destroyed by an unseen creature in the sea, forcing him back to the island. He tries again with a larger raft, but is again foiled by the creature. A third attempt ends similarly, but this time he sees the creature: a giant hawksbill sea turtle.

That evening, the man sees the red turtle crawling up the beach. In anger, he hits it on the head with a bamboo stick, then flips it over onto its back, stranding it. While working on another raft, he feels remorse and returns to the turtle but it is too heavy for him to flip over. He fetches water for it, but when he returns, it is dead. He falls asleep next to it. In the morning, the man is surprised to find a red-haired woman lying unconscious inside the shell, which has split. He fetches water for her and builds a shelter to protect her from the sun. When rain hits, the woman wakes up and goes swimming. The woman casts the shell adrift on the sea and the man does the same to his raft. The two reconcile and fall in love.

The couple have a red-haired son. The curious boy finds a glass bottle and his father and mother tell him their story through pictographs. After accidentally falling into the sea, the boy learns he is a natural swimmer, and swims with some green sea turtles. He swims back to his mother, who hugs him and looks out at the sea with apprehension. The boy grows into a young man.

One day, a tsunami hits the island, destroying most of the bamboo forest and separating the family. After the tsunami recedes, the young man searches for his parents and finds his mother wounded with no sign of his father. He swims out to sea and is joined by three turtles. They find his father clinging to a large bamboo tree. Just as he slips under the water, they arrive and rescue him. The young man also finds his glass bottle, and the family clean up the wreckage and burn the dead bamboo.

A few years later, the young man has a dream about swimming away into the sea; the water becomes static, allowing him to swim to the top of a huge wave, from which he can see further over the horizon. Seeing this as his calling, he says goodbye to his parents in the morning and swims away with the three green turtles. The man and woman continue to live on the island and grow old together. One night, after gazing at the Moon, the man closes his eyes and dies. The woman grieves. She lies next to him, and lays her hand on his. As her hand transforms into a flipper and she transforms back into the red turtle, she crawls down the beach and swims away.

Production
The film was co-produced by Wild Bunch and Studio Ghibli in association with Why Not Productions, along with funding and support from Prima Linea Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CN4 Productions, and Belvision in France, and Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Hakudodo DY Media Partners, Walt Disney Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Toho in Japan.

The film originated in 2008 when Wild Bunch co-founder Vincent Maraval visited the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli in Tokyo. Maraval met Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki who showed him Father and Daughter (2000), an animated short film written and directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit. Miyazaki told Maraval that if the studio was to ever produce a film with a foreign animator de Wit would be the one, and asked Miraval to locate him. The head of acquisitions at Wild Bunch tracked de Wit in London, where Miraval subsequently met him to discuss the possibility of producing an animated feature film. De Wit was uninterested at first, but changed his mind when he learned Miyazaki was interested to collaborate with him. The screenplay was written by de Wit and Pascale Ferran.

Release
The film had its world premiere on 18 May at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed in the Un Certain Regard section. On 13 June, it was screened as the opening film of the 2016 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. The regular French release was 29 June 2016.

It was released in Japan on 17 September 2016, by Toho. The movie was released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Walt Disney Japan through the Ghibli Ga Ippai label on March 17, 2017, with the Blu-Ray version also containing Michaël Dudok de Wit's other short films.

In May 2016, Sony Pictures Classics acquired the North and Latin American distribution rights for the film and was released in the United States on 20 January 2017.

The Red Turtle was played in the London Film Festival on 5 October 2016 and eventually released in the United Kingdom by StudioCanal on 26 May 2017.

Critical response
The Red Turtle received critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 93% score based on 169 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." Metacritic reports an 86 out of 100 rating, based on 32 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

In Japan it was released in theaters on 17 September and grossed a total of $328,750 during its first weekend.