‘Forgotten Island’ Review: A DreamWorks Fable About Friendship That Sneaks Up On You

Two best friends spend their final night before adulthood splits them apart, and somehow they end up trapped on a mythical island where the price of getting home is every memory they’ve ever shared. That is the setup for ‘Forgotten Island,’ DreamWorks Animation’s latest theatrical release, arriving from the filmmaking duo behind ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.’ It follows Jo, voiced by H.E.R., and Raissa, voiced by Liza Soberano, as their graduation night detour turns into a race against forgetting each other entirely.

The film leans hard into Filipino folklore, populating the world of Nakali with creatures and spirits pulled directly from that mythology rather than a generic fantasy grab bag. Names like Lea Salonga, Jo Koy, Manny Jacinto, Ronny Chieng, and Dolly de Leon fill out the voice cast, and the specificity of the cultural setting is baked into everything from the visual design to the humor. It’s a studio taking a genuine swing at something rooted in a particular place instead of flattening it for broad appeal.

What actually got me was how the movie refuses to sit still tonally. One minute it’s a manic buddy comedy with two exhausted teenagers bickering their way through a monster encounter, and the next it slows down to sit in something quietly devastating about watching a friendship drift. That whiplash could easily feel cheap in lesser hands, but the shift never feels like a trick being pulled on the audience, it feels earned scene by scene.

The animation itself is doing serious work here too. There’s a painterly, hand crafted texture layered under the character designs that gives Nakali a storybook quality, and every so often the film dips into flatter, more graphic stylization for flashbacks or memory sequences that hits like a gut punch precisely because it looks so different from everything around it. It’s the kind of visual choice that only lands if the emotional groundwork underneath it is solid, and here it mostly is.

Not everything holds together as tightly. Some of the island’s supporting creatures feel like they wandered in from a different draft of the script, present for a joke or a set piece rather than woven into the actual stakes of the story. The middle stretch occasionally loses track of the two girls at the center in favor of spectacle, and I found myself wishing the film trusted its central relationship enough to slow down even more than it already does. When it remembers what it’s actually about, though, it’s remarkably effective, and the ending sequence in particular earns every bit of the emotion it’s chasing.

I also think this is one of those rare family films that isn’t just tolerable for adults in the room, it’s genuinely built for them too. The humor lands on two different frequencies without ever feeling like it’s winking over the kids’ heads, and the central ache of watching people you love grow into different versions of themselves is not a kid’s problem exactly, it’s everyone’s problem. ‘Forgotten Island’ understands that and doesn’t condescend to either audience.

By the time the credits hit, what stays with you isn’t the monster designs or the jokes, it’s the specific feeling of realizing a friendship has an expiration date whether you’re ready for it or not. This is a film that trusts a very particular story to carry universal weight, and more often than not, it does. A few underused side characters and a saggy middle stretch keep it from being flawless, but the emotional core never wavers, and that’s the part that actually matters.

I walked out of ‘Forgotten Island’ thinking about the version of my own friendships that used to fit in a single summer and don’t anymore, which is about as high a compliment as an animated film about a fictional island can earn. This is confident, culturally specific storytelling from a studio that clearly wanted to make something that mattered to it, and that intention shows in nearly every frame. My score for ‘Forgotten Island’ lands at 9 out of 10.

What did you think of ‘Forgotten Island,’ and does the ending hit as hard for you as it did for me? Let me know in the comments.