ADMIT ONE · Matinee, Nakali Island · Seat: Wherever the Memories Are
We watched Forgotten Island and kept catching echoes. The neon rush felt like Arcane. The graphic punch felt like Miles Morales' Spider-Verse. The big run near the end gave us the same rush as Bubble, when the parkour and the music finally lock together.
So we went looking. Did DreamWorks mean any of that, or were we seeing our own watchlist in it?
Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the duo behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, have done plenty of interviews about this film. Some of our hunches line up with what they say. Some don't. Here's the split.
What the directors name
'90s anime, on purpose
Whenever a character tells a story, the movie drops into flat 2D animation. The directors told Polygon those scenes come straight from Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball and Street Fighter, the shows they grew up on.
Each flashback matches the person telling it. Raww the weredog is vain, so his memory plays like a fighting game. Mercado's phrase for it was "muscles on muscles."
Bungi's version is soft and rounded. Crawford told Animation Scoop that one nods to Crayon Shin-chan. Prince Mermahn gets sparkles and heart-shaped lens effects, his own glamour shot in the style of Sailor Moon.
Snipple Animation, a studio in Quezon City, drew every 2D scene. Crawford told Polygon that Snipple has spent decades animating TV for the US and Japan, and that it meant a lot to have a Filipino studio work on a story about Filipino culture.
Satoshi Kon, Eternal Sunshine and The Hangover
The climax has its own list.
Mild spoiler for the setup: near the end, Raissa runs through her shared memories with Jo while they disappear around her.
Mercado told /Film that the team knew this "memoryscape" would be a visual tour de force, and that it also had to be very emotional. Crawford named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Hangover. Both directors pointed to Satoshi Kon, the late director of Perfect Blue and Paprika, whose editing throws a character from one place and time into the next.
The Prestige
They also told The Direct that Christopher Nolan's The Prestige shaped how they built the ending. We'll stop there. If you've seen The Prestige, you know what the comparison is about, and if you haven't seen Forgotten Island, you'll want to find out for yourself.
A soundtrack with a Filipino accent
The soundtrack pulls in Francis Magalona, BINI, SB19, Ruby Ibarra and Lea Salonga, who voices the Dreaded Manananggal (Inquirer).
Composer Nathan Matthew David told Philstar that he built the Manananggal's world around Salonga's voice: her breathing, chanting and singing, shaped by Maguindanao chants. The trick came from Jaws. You know she's close from the music before she ever shows up. The Inquirer adds that he used the gandingan, a talking gong, for her sound.
What we noticed (and they didn't say)
Spider-Verse
The main CG look stays close to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the directors' previous film (Wikipedia). If that painterly, punchy style reminds you of Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse, we felt it too. We couldn't find the directors naming Spider-Verse for this film, so that's our comparison.
Arcane
Same story with Arcane. The way a song can carry a scene while the camera goes wild felt familiar. Nobody on the film has said they were going for it, as far as we could find.
Bubble
Bubble isn't on any influence list we found. But a run through collapsing spaces, cut to music, with the emotion doing the heavy lifting, is why the ending felt like a cousin of it. Kon's editing is the documented link. Bubble is ours.
So, was it intentional?
Partly, and the directors can tell you which parts. The anime flashbacks, the Kon-style memory run, the Prestige structure and the Filipino sound were all deliberate, and they've said so on the record.
The Arcane, Spider-Verse and Bubble echoes come from us. They make sense for filmmakers who clearly watch what a lot of us watch, but those links are a viewer's read, not a director's quote.
One more thing, from where we sit in the Philippines: a tiyanak, a batibat, Snipple in the credits and Lea Salonga as the Manananggal, all in a DreamWorks original. That lands with a lot of history behind it.
Watch the shelf it came from
If Forgotten Island worked for you, these are the titles its directors named, plus the ones we kept thinking about.
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022): the same directors' last film, with a similar painterly look.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): a man has his memories of a relationship erased, then fights to keep them.
- Paprika (2006): Satoshi Kon's dream-hopping chase, where a device lets therapists walk into patients' dreams.
- Perfect Blue (1997): Kon's first feature, about a pop idol turned actress whose grip on reality starts slipping.
- The Prestige (2006): two rival magicians, and a structure the directors borrowed for their ending.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): our comparison, and the movie that made comic-book animation feel new.
- Arcane (2021): our other comparison, two sisters on opposite sides of a city's split.
- Sailor Moon (1992): the source of Prince Mermahn's sparkles.