‘Forgotten Island’ distracts viewers from its rich message

By Danielle Cherry 

Best friends since grade school, Raissa (Liza Soberano) and Jo (H.E.R) have been inseparable. By the time choosing a college comes around, the girls have shared countless memories together, one of which is the stories Jo’s grandmother shares with them about a magical island called Nakali.

Jo thinks she has life figured out for them both, but when Raissa reveals her plans to go to America for university their unshakable friendship is suddenly thrown into uncertainty.  

To make matters worse, at the exact moment Raissa and Jo are about to say goodbye, the portal to Nakali opens. The pair are flung into an adventure Jo always dreamed of and Raissa always dreaded, revealing just how different they really are.

At first the girls encounter kind creatures, who, while overexcited about being friends with them, do their best to aid the girls in getting home. But quickly things go south when they encounter two demons—Batiba, an agoraphobic memory demon, and Manang, a flying demon. Both demons have different motivations but both are ultimately out to hurt the girls. 

Manang’s visual design is taken right out of a horror movie. The animators leaned far too into the “American Horror Story” sense of contortion for the creature. With its power being that the top half of its body separates from the bottom and moves on its own, to say it’s horrifying to watch is an understatement. 

The creature gets right up against the camera as the lens tilts, making it feel extremely eerie. If I was a child in the theater, I probably would have screamed. 

Conversely, the saturation of colors for this movie is turned all the way up, to an almost overwhelming level. The loud colors of the film offset the stark blacks of Manang, making it overstimulating to sit through. 

Paired with the dazzling colors, the movie boasts a very “Kpop Demon Hunters” animation style. While “Kpop Demon Hunters” has a good balance of animation style, “Forgotten Island” does not, instead it was both sophisticated and overwhelming at the same time. 

Central to the theme of this story is the girls’ friendship, but more than that it is the memories they share. During the entire movie, Batinga, trapped in a dungeon of her own making, is trying to steal the memories of the girl’s friendship. However, it takes till the last moment for Rarissa to realize how desperately she needs to cling to these memories. 

While the girls are cheaply saved by the power of friendship in the end, the movie digs at something deeper. Jo and Rarissa realize that their friendship means nothing without the memories they share. 

That truth punches all the way to the ironic title of the movie: “Forgotten Island.” The creators of the movie took an actual Filipino word that means “forget” and shortened it, translating into forgotten island. Also describing what happens to the girls the moment they arrive, the title means more. It shows how forgetting changes things and because of that how much memories truly mean. 

Is anything really worth something if you can’t remember it? That is the question “Forgotten Island” begs viewers to seek. 

The only problem is, it’s pretty hard to remember that message in the face of unnecessarily stupid humor and exorbitant animation. Many times throughout the movie, fart jokes, dance offs and unnecessary camera stares are added to play into the easy laughs that children enjoy.

It’s actually frustrating. “Forgotten Island” poses such a good theme, yet wipes viewers’ memory of it by its own design. In fact, younger viewers might be too scared to even see any value in the movie at all. 

Here is a movie that shows how strong a lifelong friendship is, all the adventures and emotion and moments that create a lifetime of love for the other person. But it covers all that up with characters that are too cheeky and dialogue that could have been written by ChatGPT. With a movie that is for kids, there was an awful lot of slang and derivative terms used that doesn’t fit the audience it was marketed for.  

It is truly a shame that the writers valued the overstimulation this movie would create rather than the genuine message written in the depths.

Throughout the movie the girls sing the song “Don’t Stop Believin” at any moment possible for a mental break. I think I stopped believing in this movie the moment they hit the high note for the fifth time. 

“Forgotten Island” is currently in theaters 

Danielle Cherry is a junior communication major and writer for Cedars Sports and Assistant Editor and writer for A&E. She is a Missionary Kid from Germany and is pretty sure she is going to have nightmares about Manang body separating. 

Images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures