Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
DreamWorks Animation’s poorest outing to date is a glib, derivative ragbag aimed at the very young of brain.
True, there have been few films about the Kraken (give or take the ill-fated Clash of the Titans). But in every other guise this strident shambles from DreamWorks Animation is a blend of old themes recycled for a new, unsuspecting audience. This is Ladybird-cum-Booksmart-cum-Carrie as seen through the prism of The Little Mermaid and Turning Red. Whenever Ruby Gillman, a fifteen-year-old outsider and mathlete feels super-awkward, she grows into a giant fish – or rather the titular sea monster of Norwegian lore. It’s a heavy-handed allegory about the crippling insecurities of being a teenager and of the challenges of coming to accept who we really are. And it’s been done to death.
Ruby Gillman (voiced by Lana Condor) is really a Kraken whose mother Agatha (Toni Collette) has moved her family to dry land after falling out with her own Kraken mother (an imperious Jane Fonda). So the Gillmans have to tuck in their fins and suck in their tentacles to pass as humanoid in the quaint world of Oceanside where everybody else is just trying to fit in. Of course, Ruby has a crush on a skateboarding dude who secretly adores her from afar and she is forbidden from attending the school prom because it’s taking place on a ship in the harbour. All the tropes of the teenage romcom are trotted out with numbing inevitability, punctuated by poppy interludes from Freya Ridings and Mimi Webb. With the Gillmans’ doll-like, malleable features, the film feels like a giant platform of product placement for its own toy line.
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, from Kirk DeMicco, director of The Croods and the Netflix release Vivo, is not so much a disappointment as a conundrum. This is from DreamWorks, the company that brought us Chicken Run, Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon and The Bad Guys. The underwater scenes are surprisingly blah, particularly when compared to the oceanic wonders of Finding Nemo and the new Little Mermaid, while Ruby herself is an unprepossessing, hormonally-challenged glob of blue plasticine. There’s also an exasperating character called Brill (Sam Richardson), who is supposed to be amusing, while Ruby’s high school rival Chelsea (Annie Murphy), an Ariana Grande lookalike, is actually a flaming-haired mermaid, an allusion which will not be lost on anybody who grew up with Disney’s Ariel. As Jane Fonda’s Grandmamah says, “mermaids are vain and power-hungry – with terrible hair.” It also reminds us never to trust anybody called Chelsea.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Voices of Lana Condor, Toni Collette, Annie Murphy, Sam Richardson, Liza Koshy, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Jaboukie Young-White, Bill Chapman, Ramona Young, Eduardo Franco, Jane Fonda, Randall Thom.
Dir Kirk DeMicco and Faryn Pearl, Pro Kelly Cooney Cilella, Screenplay Pam Brady, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, Ph Jon Gutman, Ed Michelle Mendenhall, Music Stephanie Economou, Sound Randy Thom.
DreamWorks Animation-Universal Pictures.
91 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 30 June 2023. Cert. PG.
