Dreamwork's Near-Perfect Fantasy Adventure Flips a Classic Movie Trope On Its Head

It's a vivid, exciting twist on a standard coming-of-age tale

At times, it all feels a little too frantic and busy, as if Crawford and Mercado are throwing every possible distraction at viewers to keep them from examining any part of the movie long enough to find it simple or shallow. The hyperactive energy is compelling, though, and the tensions between the two leads are richer than they initially seem. That leaves adult viewers with something to think about while younger viewers are vibing on all the visual gags and shiny surfaces.

The central characters, Filipino teenagers Jo (singer-songwriter H.E.R.) and Raissa (Lisa Frankenstein’s Liza Soberano) have been besties since they met in grade school. Their friendship plays out onscreen in a series of admirably illustrative scenes that show all the ways the two girls fill in blanks for each other throughout their shared childhood. Imaginative, morbid weird kid Jo emboldens nerdy, shy Raissa. Raissa’s enthusiasm for Jo’s wild creative impulses validates Jo in ways her peers never have before. Both girls are potential outcasts whose friendship means they never have to be alone, and they grow up together in a mutually fulfilling world of wild little adventures, each commemorated by a trinket on the identical charm bracelets they build with each other.

One of the film’s more daring adult flourishes is easy to miss. Raissa’s family is affluent, living in a vast Manila estate, while Jo shares an apartment with her grandmother Fatima (beloved Filipino star Dolly De Leon). Jo helps support the household by working a series of fast-food jobs, while Raissa is free to focus on her studies. Jo takes it for granted that she won’t go to college and Raissa will, but Jo assumes they’ll live together as Raissa attends the University of Manila. When she learns that Raissa plans to go to Caltech in the U.S. instead, Jo is shattered.

On some level that she doesn’t want to admit, Jo is also mad about being abandoned, and possibly angry about Raissa’s potential bright future. While the movie doesn’t state it outright, it seems clear that while Raissa is headed for new friends and a bright future at a prestigious American school, Jo doesn’t have much to look forward to with her friend gone. Jo’s poor impulse control and contempt for rules have kept her stumbling between unsatisfying minimum-wage jobs, and it’s implied that might be the best she can hope for in life.

When a magical portal opens up on their last night together, inviting the duo to the legendary magical island of Nakali, Jo sees it as both adventure and escape. It’s a path away from mundanity and from the distance the future is already putting between her and her best friend, a way to postpone their inevitable parting. Raissa is more hesitant, even though the duo has been looking for Nakali since their elementary-school days, when Fatima started telling them stories about the place. But before they know it, they’re waking up on Nakali — and realizing they’ve already had some sort of bizarre adventure they can’t remember at all.

A large chunk of Forgotten Island tracks their quest to piece together their forgotten first day on the island. That involves enlisting the help of a were-dog named Raww (Dave Franco), who insists they’re all friends. It also involves following a series of physical clues, from Raissa’s dramatic new side-shave haircut and bat-wings to the tattoo Jo doesn’t remember getting. Other characters they met during the missing time have memories, marks, or objects that slot together to tell the story of the girls’ first day on Nakali. A catlike cave-dwelling demon named Batiba (Jenny Slate), who exchanges magic for memories, also has a key part to play in all of this.

The way these pieces fall together is weird, clever, silly, and extremely colorful, built around surprisingly dynamic, seductive visuals. Just as Crawford and Mercado turned 2022’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the sequel to a middling Shrek spin-off, into a startlingly mesmerizing, ambitious animation experiment, the writer-director duo pushes past the standard look of American CG kids’ movies here. They bridge the gap between Last Wish’s drama-driven, boldly neon 2D/3D hybrid style and K-Pop Demon Hunters-style anime touches, like flying emotive punctuation and rapid veering between visual styles for emphasis. There’s a lot of action, and it’s kinetic and hyperbolic, reflecting the big emotions at play as Jo and Raissa alternately cooperate and clash.

But none of the colorful flourishes would connect if the heart of the movie wasn’t so solid. It’s genuinely distressing to watch Raissa and Jo build a world together as each other’s support system and lifeline, only to see that friendship unravel. (Even if part of that process does involve systematically copycatting some crucial scenes from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) It’s understandable that their childhood friendship may not be suitable for either of them in adulthood, but watching Jo trying to cope with the realization that her best friend is just about to grow beyond her — and that Jo herself may not have the capacity to grow in the same way — is heady stuff for an animated movie packed with were-dog slapstick. The script puts real stakes into their relationship, and makes it easy to sympathize with both of them as they face the ways they’ve failed each other, and the reasons they still need each other.

Not everything in the movie lands with the same impact. There’s a lot of hit-or-miss comedic business, mostly stemming from support characters like the vain, posturing kataw Prince Mermahn (Kevin McCann), who looks like he just stepped off the cover of a particularly indulgent supernatural romance novel, or Bungi the tiyanak (The Acolyte’s Manny Jacinto), a giant blue baby-demon with three eyes and a mommy complex. At times, it feels like these critters, among the many other creatures populating the film, are present more as an illustrative checklist of Filipino cryptids than as actual characters. Even the ferocious Manananggal, the film’s monstrous Big Bad, is largely around for chase scenes and threatening moments, rather than fully integrating with the story.

Similarly, the pop-hit references get pretty overbearing. It’s one thing to build a few key sequences or scenes around numbers like INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” or Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” two songs with obvious thematic links to the story. It’s something else entirely when the soundtrack features so many pop licks that Forgotten Island starts to resemble a jukebox musical. (At one point, Raissa’s father, performing karaoke at a party, manages to tag three different pop hits in probably less than three minutes.) There’s plenty of original music on the soundtrack, including a radio-ready new H.E.R. pop song, but it’s a little lost under all the pop-chart music hitting in every third scene.

But these are comparative quibbles in a movie that operates on such confident emotional footing, and in such an impressively expressive vein. After seeing Mercado and Crawford put more creativity and texture into Last Wish and 2020’s The Croods: A New Age than either of those sequels probably deserved, it’s exhilarating to see them flex with a memorably original story. Forgotten Island plays with ideas that have been brought to the screen over and over, about how the official transition from childhood to adulthood is scary and melancholy as well as exciting, and how relationships are built on shared memories. But the creators put their own unmistakable stamp on those ideas. It seems uniquely appropriate for a movie built around the importance of memories to be this memorable itself.

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Forgotten Island releases in theaters on September 25.