'The Red Turtle': Watch an Exclusive Clip From Oscar Nominee for Best Animated Feature
Father-and-son turtle duo Crush and Squirt swam away with moviegoers’ hearts in Pixar’s 2003 hit, Finding Nemo, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. This year, though, Academy voters chose to honor a different family of shelled reptiles; the European animated feature The Red Turtle beat out Crush and Squirt’s return in Finding Dory for a spot among the final five nominees. (Watch an exclusive clip from the film above.)
The feature debut of Dutch illustrator Michaël Dudok de Wit, The Red Turtle — which is playing in theaters now — takes a traditional Robinson Crusoe castaway story and elevates it to the realm of myth, depicting the desert island romance that develops between an ordinary man and a large red turtle that transforms into a woman. “When I was a schoolkid, we studied Greek mythology, and there were a lot of human-animal switches happening,” de Wit tells Yahoo Movies, citing the seal-to-human selkies of Scottish folklore as another inspiration. “I think it’s universal idea.”
And despite their unique meet-cute beginning, this couple’s love story follows a universal arc as they settle down and have a son. Raised on the island his parents have come to call home, the child grows up innately attuned to the natural world. His supreme comfort with his surroundings is on display in the above clip, as he dances up rocky hills and leaps off of vertigo-inducing cliffs, plunging to the sea below. “The purpose of this scene is to show that the son feels so at ease in nature,” de Wit explains. “It was important to me to convey that there’s harmony at this point in the story.”
The scene also reveals that, while he resembles his father, the boy takes after his mother’s side of the family; once in the ocean, he joins a group of sea turtles, moving his arms in time with their flippers. De Wit says that he swam alongside real turtles in order to have a proper visual reference to illustrate this moment. “The amazing thing about turtles is that they communicate some feeling of immortality. They disappear into the ocean for years on end, and we don’t know where they go. They look like fish, but they’re closer to us.”
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