The Red Turtle

• 1. Introduction

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  The Red Turtle opens on a man clinging to wreckage in the open sea. A storm has just swept over him, and next he wakes alone on a beach. He finds fresh water, ripe fruit, and a dense bamboo forest, but no way off the island. Every raft he builds is smashed by something hidden beneath the waves. Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit directed this 2016 film, and he wrote not one line of spoken dialogue into the story. The film follows this shipwrecked man on an uninhabited island whose every escape attempt is thwarted by a red turtle. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 69th Cannes Film Festival on the 18th of May 2016. It later earned a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 89th Academy Awards. What led a French producer to Studio Ghibli's doorstep in Tokyo, and why would a Japanese animation studio bet a co-production on a silent story about a man, an island, and a turtle?

• 2. Castaway and Turtle

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  Fresh water, ripe fruit, and thick stands of bamboo await the man as he explores the island, along with a smooth rock hill rising above the terrain. A few nights in, his mind begins playing tricks on him. He sees a bridge that seems to promise a way off the island, and later a string quartet performing on the sand. He cuts bamboo and lashes together a raft, only for it to be destroyed at sea by something unseen. A second, larger raft meets the same fate. On a third attempt, he finally sees his saboteur clearly: a giant red sea turtle.

  That night, the turtle drags itself up the beach toward him. Furious, he strikes it with a stick and rolls it onto its back, leaving it helpless in the sand. Guilt sets in while he works on another raft, and he goes back to help the turtle, but he cannot turn it upright alone. He carries water to it anyway, and returns to find it has already died. He sleeps beside its body that night. Come morning, a red-haired woman lies unconscious inside the turtle's split-open shell. He brings her water and builds a shelter against the sun. Rain eventually rouses her, and she rises to swim in it. She pushes the empty shell out to sea, and he lets his raft drift away too. The pair make peace with each other and fall in love. The island that once held only one castaway now holds two.

• 3. A Son of the Island

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  A red-haired son is born to the couple, and he grows up as curious as his parents once were desperate. One day he finds a glass bottle, and his parents show him their history through pictographs rather than words. He later tumbles into the sea by accident and discovers he swims naturally, gliding alongside a group of green sea turtles. He swims back to his mother, who wraps him in a hug but watches the ocean afterward with visible unease. The boy keeps growing, and in time he becomes a young man on the same shores where his parents once fought for survival. That same sea will soon test the whole family at once.

• 4. Tsunami and Rescue

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  A tsunami eventually strikes the island, tearing through the bamboo forest and scattering the family in the chaos. Once the water recedes, the young man searches the wreckage and finds his mother wounded, with no trace of his father anywhere. He swims out into open water, where three turtles join him in the search. Together they find the father clutching a large bamboo tree, and they reach him just as he slips beneath the surface. The young man also recovers his old glass bottle among the debris, and the family works together to clear the wreckage and burn the dead bamboo.

  A few years pass before the young man has a dream of swimming out to sea, where the water turns still and lets him climb to the crest of a huge wave. From there he can see far past the horizon, and he reads it as a calling he cannot ignore. He says goodbye to his parents one morning and swims off with the three green turtles. His parents remain on the island and grow old together in his absence. One night, after gazing up at the Moon, the man closes his eyes and dies. The woman lies down beside him and rests her hand on his. Her hand slowly becomes a flipper, and she turns back into the red turtle she once was, crawling down the beach and swimming out to sea. Telling this story took a partnership between studios based thousands of miles apart, in Tokyo and Paris.

• 5. An Unlikely Partnership

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  In 2008, Wild Bunch co-founder Vincent Maraval traveled to Tokyo to visit Studio Ghibli. There he met Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, who screened him Father and Daughter, a 2000 animated short written and directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit. Miyazaki told Maraval that if Ghibli ever made a film with a foreign animator, Dudok de Wit was the one to ask, and he sent Maraval off to find him. Wild Bunch's head of acquisitions eventually tracked Dudok de Wit down in London, where Maraval met him to pitch an animated feature. Dudok de Wit turned down the idea at first, then reconsidered once he learned Miyazaki himself wanted to collaborate. He and French screenwriter Pascale Ferran then wrote the screenplay together.

  The finished film was produced by Wild Bunch and Studio Ghibli alongside Why Not Productions. Additional funding came from Prima Linea Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CN4 Productions, and Belvision in France, and from Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Hakudodo DY Media Partners, Walt Disney Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Toho in Japan. Turning that screenplay into moving images meant choosing, frame by frame, between paper and a digital tablet.

• 6. Charcoal, Photoshop, and CGI

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  Michaël Dudok de Wit initially planned to animate on paper, scanning each drawing afterward for digital coloring. After running tests on a Cintiq graphics tablet, he switched to drawing digitally instead. The island's backgrounds, though, were still rendered the old way, sketched in charcoal on paper before being scanned into the computer. Colors were added afterward in Photoshop, with light and shadow effects composited into each finished scene.

  The crew filmed live-action reference footage of actors, but none of it was rotoscoped directly onto the animation. Instead, animators used a method called analytic animation, isolating only the actors' strongest poses from the footage as a guide. Both the raft and the turtle were built as computer-generated models, with the turtle's shell texture painted separately in Photoshop before being applied. Animators then retraced the CGI's linework frame by frame and hand-drew every shadow before layering it back over the computer-generated base. That hand-finished CGI turtle would soon carry the film from festival screens in France to theaters across Japan.

• 7. From Cannes to Cinemas

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  On the 13th of June, the film opened the 2016 Annecy International Animated Film Festival before its regular French theatrical release on the 29th of June. Toho brought it to Japanese theaters on the 17th of September 2016. Walt Disney Japan later issued it on DVD and Blu-ray under the Ghibli Ga Ippai label on the 17th of March 2017, with the Blu-ray edition also including several of Dudok de Wit's earlier short films.

  Sony Pictures Classics had already acquired the North and Latin American distribution rights back in May 2016, ahead of a United States release on the 20th of January 2017. The film also screened at the London Film Festival on the 5th of October 2016, followed by a UK release from StudioCanal on the 26th of May 2017. In France, Wild Side Vidéo issued the DVD and Blu-ray through Warner Home Video in 2017. By the time it reached shelves worldwide, the film had already begun collecting attention from critics and award bodies.

• 8. Critical Recognition

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  The film's Japanese theatrical run brought in $328,750 during its opening weekend alone. At the Academy Awards ceremony on the 26th of February 2017, the nomination for Best Animated Feature credited both Michaël Dudok de Wit and producer Toshio Suzuki.

  The Annie Awards, held on the 4th of February 2017, recognized the film itself for Best Animated Feature Independent. Individual honors went to Mouloud Oussid for animated effects, Michaël Dudok de Wit for directing, and Laurent Perez del Mar for music. Dudok de Wit shared a further writing honor with Pascale Ferran.

  Back at Cannes, on the 21st of May 2016, Dudok de Wit received the Un Certain Regard Special Prize. The film was also recognized in that section's Camera d'Or field.

  Critics' organizations across North America echoed that praise through the winter of 2016 into early 2017. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association weighed in on the 4th of December. The Critics' Choice Awards, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, and the Toronto Film Critics Association followed on the 11th of December. The Chicago Film Critics Association added its recognition on the 15th of December. The Online Film Critics Society followed on the 3rd of January 2017, and the Satellite Awards did the same on the 19th of February. Each organization placed The Red Turtle among the year's best animated features.

  Belgium's Magritte Award ceremony, on the 4th of February 2017, named the film Best Foreign Film in Coproduction and gave its Best Sound honor to Nils Fauth and Peter Soldan. That Magritte win closed out the run of recognition the film collected across its first awards season.