‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’: Annecy Review

Dir: Kirk Demicco, Faryn Pearl. US. 2023. 91mins.

A teenage girl, a social outcast whose main worry was getting to attend the school prom, suddenly has to deal with a whole raft of other problems: she belatedly learns that contact with sea water turns her – and all the women of her family – into giant, tentacled Krakens. The latest release from Dreamworks, with a voice cast that includes Toni Collette and Jane Fonda, is not the first film to encourage us to see the world from the monster’s perspective, nor is it by any means the only film to suggest adolescence – with its mortifying anxieties, that sudden unfamiliarity with your own body – as the moment which unleashes hitherto unsuspected powers. But while it’s not an entirely novel story (comparisons with both Luca and Turning Red are inevitable), it is a cute, frequently funny and very likeable film.

The film looks terrific, with its candy-store colour palette and beguiling underwater opulence

Original animated properties such as this will always struggle to gain the same commercial traction as something drawn from a recognisable IP such as the last animation from Dreamworks, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. And it remains to be seen whether releasing Ruby Gillman in the same month as Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse will impact on its box office potential. But, given a marketing push, the appealing character design and peppy visuals should coax animation fans to dip their toes into the water when it opens across multiple territories on June 30. A slightly perfunctory third act, however, may limit the film’s appeal with older audiences. Directing the picture are Kirk Demicco (The Croods, Vivo) and first-time director Faryn Pearl, who previously worked as a storyboard artist on titles including Trolls World Tour.

Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor) has always felt a little different from the other kids. Which is not surprising, given that she and her family are all sea-dwelling Krakens who have assimilated more or less seamlessly into the human world. Their blue skin, gills and lack of a spinal cord attract comments occasionally, but the Gillmans have learnt to deflect attention by claiming to be Canadian. It’s all fine as long as Ruby obeys her mother’s strictest rule, and stays out of the water at all costs. But as school prom looms, and Ruby harbours feelings for a fellow student, the inevitable happens, and Ruby learns the secret that her mother (Toni Collette) had closely guarded: she’s not just any Kraken, she is sea beast royalty. Add salt water and she morphs into a giant bio-luminescent tentacled creature.

The discoveries come thick and fast. Not only is Ruby a giant Kraken, she also learns that she has a Kraken grandmother, Grandmahmah (Jane Fonda, clearly having a lot of fun), a warrior queen of the ocean and defender of peace. And the main threat to maritime harmony are the mermaids. It’s a neat role reversal, to position the mermaids as the narcissistic mean girls of the sea, and one which might be seen as a sly subversion of the siren narrative of Disney’s recently released live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.

The rehabilitation of the mythic Kraken is, in some ways, a bold decision on the part of the filmmakers. Previously depicted (in everything from The Sea Beast to Pirates Of The Caribbean) as a relentless angry mass of churning tentacles, the Kraken symbolise the colossal destructive power of the sea. But in Ruby, the only thing that is churning (at first at least) are hormones. She’s adorable: a maths geek with Stretch Armstrong noodle-limbs; part girl, part squeezy rubber stress ball. There’s something unusually tactile about the design of her human-passing form. Her transformation into a giant Kraken, meanwhile, is dramatic. She changes colour, from inoffensive blue to a strident, regal purple. She glows fiercely in the underwater world that had been denied her until now. But while she doesn’t have shoulders as such, she still has the adolescent droop of a kid who has spent a lifetime trying to disappear.

The film looks terrific, with its candy-store colour palette and the beguiling underwater opulence of Grandmahmah’s palace. And the voice work is first rate: along with a wonderfully OTT Fonda, Collette and Condor bring a conflicted tenderness to the mother-daughter dynamic. But the story itself is in too much of a hurry to finish, leading to a third act climax that is over before the tension has had a chance to build, and a message of acceptance that might be a little too neat, given all the tentacles and eye-lasers that Ruby’s school friends have had to suddenly come to terms with.