The Red Turtle

Plot

A man, set adrift by a storm, wakes on an uninhabited island with fresh water, fruit, and a dense bamboo forest dominated by a smooth rock hill. After several nights he hallucinates a bridge and a string quartet. He builds a bamboo raft but an unseen creature destroys it, forcing him back. He builds larger rafts twice more; the third time he sees the creature: a giant red sea turtle.

That evening the turtle crawls up the beach; the man hits it with a bamboo stick and flips it onto its back. Feeling remorse, he tries to help but cannot flip it back. He fetches water, but the turtle dies. He falls asleep beside it.

In the morning a red-haired woman lies unconscious inside the split shell. He fetches water and builds a shelter; when rain comes she wakes and goes swimming. She casts the shell adrift; he does the same with his raft. They fall in love.

They have a red-haired son. The boy finds a glass bottle; his parents tell their story through pictographs. After falling into the sea, the boy learns he is a natural swimmer and swims with green sea turtles. He grows into a young man.

A tsunami destroys most of the bamboo forest and separates the family. The young man finds his mother wounded; he swims out and, joined by three turtles, rescues his father clinging to a large bamboo tree. The family cleans up and burns the dead bamboo.

Production

The film originated in 2008 when Wild Bunch co-founder Vincent Maraval visited Studio Ghibli in Tokyo and met co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, who showed him Michaël Dudok de Wit's short film Father and Daughter. Miyazaki said Dudok de Wit would be the foreign animator for a Ghibli co-production. Maraval tracked Dudok de Wit in London; Dudok de Wit initially declined but changed his mind upon learning of Miyazaki's interest. The screenplay was written by de Wit and Pascale Ferran.

Dudok de Wit originally planned paper animation scanned for digital coloring but switched to a graphics tablet after tests on a Cintiq. Backgrounds were drawn with charcoal on paper, scanned, and colored in Photoshop; light and shadow effects were composited. Live action references were shot for analytic animation, isolating actors' strongest poses, but nothing was rotoscoped. The raft and turtle were created as CGI; the turtle shell texture was made separately in Photoshop. Animators retraced the CGI linework frame-by-frame and manually drew shadow effects over the CGI.

Release

The Red Turtle had its world premiere on 18 May 2016 at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. It opened the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on 13 June 2016 and was released in France on 29 June 2016. Toho released it in Japan on 17 September 2016. Sony Pictures Classics acquired North and Latin American rights and released it in the United States on 20 January 2017. StudioCanal released it in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2017.