A vibrant and lightning-paced ode to female friendship and Filipino folklore, Forgotten Island is the latest from DreamWorks Animation, which has built an impressive resume in the 25 years since Shrek first hit theaters. While the animation quality of its primary competitor, Pixar, has gotten exponentially crisper and more detailed since their debut in the mid-90s, the actual style itself has largely remained the same. It certainly hasn’t held them back and, in many ways, remains their calling card; when you ask AI to generate an image of your cat, there’s a reason the result looks like a frame from a Pixar movie. But DreamWorks has been evolving the aesthetic of their output over the past few years with films like The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot, moving past Pixaresque photorealism and instead favoring hand-drawn influences.

Set in the Philippines sometime during the 90s, Forgotten Island anchors on the tight-knit friendship between a pair of high school seniors: the rambunctious Jo (H.E.R.) and the brainy Raissa (Liza Soberano). Through countless sleepovers over the years, they’ve become enamored with stories told by Jo’s grandmother Lola (Dolly de Leon) about the magical island of Nakali that she claims to have visited as a child. Though their respective friendship bracelets are heavy with charms to commemorate their shared experiences, circumstances conspire to separate them when Raissa gets accepted to CalTech in the States. Spending one last night near the ocean together, the two discover a glowing sand dollar that transports them to the mystical land they spent much of their teen years hearing about in Lola’s tales.

Jo and Raissa wake up on a Nakali beach with no memory of the past 12 hours and questions like “what happened last night?” and “why does Raissa have a set of wings latched on her shoulders?” From there, we meet mythical creatures like the lively were-aspin Raww (Dave Franco) and the cherubic demon Bungi (Manny Jacinto) who endeavor to help our best friends regain their memories and get home. If you were to put Dude, Where’s My Car? and Booksmart in a blender with dashes of Japanese anime and American action cinema, Forgotten Island is what you’d get when the blade assembly stopped spinning. As someone who appreciated its disparate influences, I confess the film from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish co-directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado is occasionally too hyperactive for its own good.

But as the film zig-zags back and forth to piece together Jo and Raissa’s lost time, it continues to find clever ways to pay off and recontextualize narrative bits set up early in their journey on the mysterious island. With Polaroids that assist in clearing the fog of memory and Raww’s declaration that he, Jo and Raissa are now a part of “The Wild Pack”, Forgotten Island also cribs a bit from the conceit of The Hangover, albeit in a more family friendly manner. Along those lines, the movie leans on spirited characters who untangle the convoluted plotline, like the Handsome Squidward-like Kataw named Prince Mermahn, voiced by Kevin McCann. Raww, who grows concerned that too many folks are interceding on The Wild Pack, dubs the merfolk prince “The Creature From The Crap Lagoon” at one point.

The influence of anime pillars like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon on American animated output can be detected in exceptional projects like The Mitchells Vs. The Machines and Turning Red and while Forgotten Island might not be up to that level, it’s a strong continuation of the trend. The movie also merges the sensibilities of both shōnen and shōjo manga, making room for epic action scenes and sparkly facial reactions. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who also wrote the script together, find nuggets of inspiration from more unlikely sources, shifting the muscular focus of the Dutch-Dillon handshake from Predator to a running visual metaphor about the unbreakability of friendship. Forgotten Island is the kind of kinetic animated offering that I could imagine young people making memories watching (and re-watching) together for years to come.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Heart Of The Beast, starring Brad Pitt and J. K. Simmons, follows a Special Forces officer and his retired combat dog after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the middle of the vast and dangerous Alaskan wilderness.
Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson and Merritt Wever, tells the true story of journalist Chris Hansen and his role in making the NBC reality crime series To Catch A Predator an infamous piece of television history.
Opening at Cinema Center is Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, starring Rinko Kikuchi and Alberto Guerra, which finds a passionate competitor in the Tokyo ballroom dance scene withdrawing into isolation due to personal tragedy but developing an infatuation with a new instructor when she returns.