Forgotten Island

DreamWorks Animation has built some of its most enduring films around unlikely friendships, yet Forgotten Island approaches that familiar territory from a more intimate and culturally specific angle. Set in the Philippines during the 1990s, the film introduces Jo, voiced with warmth and restless energy by H.E.R., and Raissa, played with persuasive restraint by Liza Soberano. Friends since childhood, the two have reached the uncomfortable moment when affection is no longer enough to guarantee that their lives will continue along the same path. Raissa has been accepted into the California Institute of Technology, fulfilling her parents’ ambitions but preparing to leave Jo behind. Their final evening together should offer a joyful farewell; instead, a mysterious portal carries them to Nakalimutan, usually shortened to Nakali, a supernatural island populated by creatures drawn from Filipino mythology. Worse still, the island gradually consumes their memories, threatening to erase not merely their route home but the friendship that brought them there.

Written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado, Forgotten Island is itself the product of a long friendship. The filmmakers first worked together more than a decade ago on Kung Fu Panda 2, before collaborating on The Croods: A New Age and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. That history matters because the relationship between Jo and Raissa is not treated as a decorative lesson about loyalty. It has the untidy familiarity of a bond formed before either person knew who she would become. Jo disguises her fear of abandonment beneath impulsiveness, while Raissa converts her uncertainty into plans and rational explanations. Their conflict is therefore more painful than a conventional argument engineered to keep a plot moving: each is trying to protect herself from the possibility that growing up may mean becoming a stranger to the person who knows her best. The Filipino concept of kapwa—a shared identity founded on mutual care and recognition—quietly underpins their journey, while the expression Tayo na, meaning “let us go together,” becomes an emotional key to a story about learning that togetherness does not necessarily require standing still.

The decision to place the story in the 1990s is more than a nostalgic excuse for INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” or a joke comparing the shape-shifting canine Raww to Teen Wolf. Without smartphones or social media, separation possesses a weight that younger audiences may find almost exotic: maintaining a friendship across an ocean demanded intention, patience and faith. The period also allows the film to embrace the pop culture that shaped its directors without becoming imprisoned by references. Its most revealing source of inspiration is more personal. During a ten-day research trip to the Philippines in spring 2025, Joel Crawford, Januel P. Mercado, producer Mark Swift, production designer Ryan Carlson and art director Christopher Grun travelled through Manila and several islands. A lively welcome party organised by Januel P. Mercado’s family subsequently inspired Raissa’s farewell celebration. This connection between lived experience and fantasy gives the early Manila scenes an affectionate texture, assisted by a palette derived from the slightly faded family photographs of Januel P. Mercado.

Once the girls reach Nakali, the film enthusiastically abandons visual caution. Palawan and El Nido informed the island’s landscapes, while ultraviolet photography and 1990s rave culture inspired its electric cyan and magenta flourishes. The Kapre forest borrows the multicoloured bark of Philippine rainbow eucalyptus trees; the Duwende settlement recalls Bohol’s Chocolate Hills; and the island market combines sari-sari stores with mythological customers such as the minotaur-like Sarangay. The density is not merely an impression: the production devised 328 variations for every category of vegetation, each available in ten colours, producing more than 11,000 plants. Such figures would mean little if the images felt mechanically crowded, but cinematographer Scott Cullen, visual-effects supervisor Betsy Nofsinger and character-animation head Sean Sexton turn Nakali into a place that seems to grow faster than the eye can process it. Three flashbacks push the experiment further by adopting different styles influenced by Japanese anime. They were produced by Snipple Animation in Quezon City, ensuring that the film’s Filipino identity exists not only in what appears on screen but also in the artists helping to create it.

The creatures provide the film with its most inspired mixture of the adorable, the grotesque and the ridiculous. Raww, performed by Dave Franco, is a Filipino were-dog whose uncontrollable transformations make his entire existence resemble a supernatural case of bad puberty. His swagger conceals the loneliness of someone desperate to belong to a pack, lending unexpected vulnerability to the comedy. Batiba, voiced by Jenny Slate, transforms the tree-dwelling Batibat of Ilocano folklore into a seemingly delicate, tarsier-inspired creature that feeds on memories. Bungi Tiyanak, brought to life by Manny Jacinto, is an almost three-metre-tall, three-eyed demon baby with a moustache, an artist’s temperament and two centuries of childish tantrums behind him. The furious Duwende ruler Truffle Wuffle, voiced by Ronny Chieng, cannot endure being called cute, while the vain Prince Mermahn, played by Kevin McCann, behaves like a matinée idol trapped in his own publicity campaign. These characters could have become a parade of marketable sidekicks, but their insecurities echo those of the heroines: almost everyone on Nakali is terrified of being unwanted, misremembered or left alone.

The formidable Manananggal provides the island with a genuine sense of danger. Derived from the Tagalog word associated with separation or detachment, this vampiric figure can divide her upper body from her lower half and fly into the night. DreamWorks reportedly constructed nearly 10,000 digital controls to animate her, making her one of the studio’s most technically complex characters, but it is Lea Salonga who gives the creature her tragic authority. Casting an artist whose singing voices helped define Disney’s Jasmine and Mulan is an inspired piece of animation history, although her performance goes beyond ceremonial prestige. Beneath Manang’s menace lies grief and an aching solitude, complicating what might otherwise have been a conventional final antagonist. The same thoughtfulness informs the score by Nathan Matthew David, who incorporates Filipino instruments without reducing them to exotic decoration. Working with T’boli, Kalinga and Maguindanao musicians, he uses bamboo instruments, Tongatong rhythms and Kulintang gongs; some of those gongs effectively “speak” coded phrases announcing the Manananggal’s arrival or asking where her wings have gone. Most movingly, Jo and Raissa do not receive separate themes. Their friendship has one melody, initially expressed through analogue synthesisers and drum machines before expanding into an orchestral statement as their relationship changes.

The narrative trajectory remains recognisable, and the film occasionally explains its ideas about memory more directly than necessary. From the moment Jo fears being forgotten, the destination of her emotional journey is rarely in doubt, while the torrent of comic companions sometimes interrupts the quieter tension between the two girls. Yet Forgotten Island earns its sentiment because forgetting is not presented simply as a magical curse. It is also what time can do naturally: childhood rituals disappear, private languages lose their meaning, and the people who once seemed inseparable learn to inhabit different worlds. The film understands that memories do not remain precious because they are permanent, but precisely because they are fragile. With its blue demon baby, preening merman, furious miniature monarch and memory-eating monsters, this is among DreamWorks’ strangest mainstream productions in years. Beneath that delirious surface, however, lies a sincere and beautifully specific story about friendship surviving the frightening necessity of change. A future late-night cult favourite disguised as a family adventure, Forgotten Island deserves

Forgotten Island
Written and directed by Joel Crawford, Januel P. Mercado
Produced by Mark Swift
Starring Manon Bresch, Anaïde Rozam, Xavier Lacaille, Billy Crawford
Cinematography: Scott Cullen
Edited by James Ryan
Music by Nathan Matthew David
Production companies: DreamWorks Animation
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release dates: September 25, 2026 (United States), October 21, 2026 (France)
Running time: 98 minutes

Seen on 6 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre