Forgotten Island Review - The Incredible Animated Film You Probably Didn’t See This Weekend
Forgotten Island is a film obsessed with the specific weight of memory, and it is one of the finest animated features of the year – which makes it something close to a crime that it likely won’t even claim the first or even second highest spot at the box office in its opening weekend. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado have built a film densely packed with Filipino mythology, and that density is the film’s greatest asset. Every frame here does real work. Every supporting character exists not merely as comic relief or plot mechanism, but as an externalization of some facet of the central friendship between Jo and Raissa, and the film moves through its runtime with a tightness that never wastes a single scene on filler.
The setup is deceptively simple. Josephine “Jo” Yuson, voiced by Grammy winner H.E.R., is an overzealous dreamer growing up in the Philippines, her father long absent and her imagination filled entirely by the mythology her grandmother Fatima has passed down to her – particularly the legend of the forgotten island of Nakali. Raissa Molina, voiced by Liza Soberano, has been her best friend ever since the two were sent to the principal’s office together as children, and their bond deepened through years of shared imaginative escape into Nakali’s invented wonders. But childhood ends, as it always does. Raissa is bound for Caltech. Lola Fatima has passed away. And Jo, who has spent her entire life gathering momentum like a wrecking ball with nowhere to land, is terrified of being left behind by the one person who has always kept pace with her.
What makes this conflict land with real emotional force, rather than settling for the well-worn coming-of-age territory it initially resembles, is the specificity the film brings to both characters’ guilt. Jo's inability to slow down and accept change is treated with genuine compassion rather than simple diagnosis. Raissa, meanwhile, carries a quieter but equally corrosive secret: she has let Jo believe that Caltech was her parents’ decision rather than admit that leaving was something she actually wanted for herself. Neither girl is simply right or simply wrong, and the film trusts its young audience to sit with that moral complexity rather than resolving it too neatly.
The portal that flings both girls to Nakali for real – discovered via a magical sand dollar on the eve of Raissa’s departure – sets the film’s adventure proper into motion, and the world Crawford and Mercado build once they arrive is a genuine visual accomplishment: a combination of digital precision and hand-sketched detail that gives the film a texture closer to the three-color printing process of vintage comic books than to typical studio animation. It is worth seeking out in the best format available, because the image itself is doing narrative work – Nakali feels genuinely lived-in and mythologically coherent rather than merely decorative.
The creatures populating this world are where the film’s specific cultural grounding pays its richest dividends. Most prominent among these is Raww, voiced by Dave Franco, who is not simply a talking dog sidekick but specifically a were-aspin, with a design inspired by one of the free-roaming street dogs common to Filipino cities that feels like a detail chosen with real cultural intention rather than convenient shorthand.
The soundtrack deserves particular mention, front-loading the film with classic needle-drops from the eighties and nineties – INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” chief among them – deployed with an emotional precision that earns every bit of the nostalgia it’s reaching for but that never competes with the film’s more culturally specific musical choices by composer Nathan Matthew David for attention.
H.E.R. and Soberano anchor the entire enterprise with performances that manage to feel like the emotional center of a film otherwise crowded with vivid, scene-grabbing supporting characters – no small feat given how thoroughly Dave Franco, Jenny Slate, Manny Jacinto, and Kevin McCann’s perfectly smug narcissistic Mermahn threaten to run away with individual scenes. That the film always returns focus to Jo and Raissa’s fraying, deepening friendship is a testament to careful structural discipline as much as to the strength of the two lead performances, rendered with more genuine emotional intelligence than the vast majority of this year’s animated slate has managed, and wrapped in a visual style unlike anything else currently in theaters.
Suffice to say that Forgotten Island deserves an audience considerably larger than its opening weekend box office has reflected. Go see it. Bring your best friend. You’ll understand why by the time the credits roll.