How do you capture the essence and magic of memories?
That was the question on the minds of Writers/Directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado as they developed Forgotten Island. The film is a coming-of-age story following two teenagers, Jo and Raissa, in the Philippines in the 1990s. As Raissa prepares to leave for college in America, Jo realizes their friendship may never be the same. Celebrating their last night together before Raissa leaves for school, the friends are transported to a mysterious fantasy island where they’re forced to decide whether being able to return home is worth forgetting the memories they have of each other.
Forgotten Island is the first original DreamWorks’ Animation feature film to be written and directed by the creatives that conceived the idea. Along with steeping the story in Filipino culture and folklore, it was important to Crawford and Mercado that the film be set in the 1990s, a time before technology allowed people to easily record digital memories and loved ones could stay connected with the touch of a button when they moved far away. “When cameras had room for just 13 pictures, you were very purposeful with each photo,” says Mercado. “Now we have phones that can take thousands of pictures that you’ll never look at again.”
Because so many of Jo and Raissa’s memories are captured in photographs, Crawford and Mercado wanted to make sure their cinematic techniques felt real. “When you’re looking at old photos and videos, you’ve got light leaks and lens flare, sometimes humidity fogging the edge of the frame,” says Mercado. The team worked closely with VFX Supervisor Betsy Nofsinger to achieve these effects.
Used by the team on 2022’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, one tool created a lens effect called chromatic aberration. With a physical camera, the lens can fail to capture color boundaries accurately, resulting in a multicolored outline surrounding all the high-contrast objects in the image. The result in Forgotten Island was a sense of disorientation and unreality that made sequences feel like memories. “We did a lot of testing of how far we could push the effect and keep everything legible, but still feel dreamlike,” says Art Director Christopher Gun.
The opening scenes in the film emphasize the use of this effect as Jo and Raissa build their friendship from childhood, indicating these early sequences are memories. “It’s our way of showing the audience what’s to come and giving them the memory first,” says Crawford. “You’re experiencing the past, present, and future at the same time. You’re moving backwards and forwards. It’s like the memories are alive.”
Looking Sharp
A total of 26 crew members of Filipino descent worked on the film, and Mercado drew from his own memories to bring the setting and era to life. “The first day that I started on the movie, Januel came in with a stack of photo albums from his trips to the Philippines in the ‘90s when he was a kid,” says Production Designer Ryan Carlson. “He just dropped them in my lap and said, ‘Let’s start here.’” The crew referenced these photos for details like the colors of the walls, decor, even the kinds of snacks people kept in their kitchens. Memories can be brought to life by the smallest of details, so they wanted to get every element right.
For a sequence surrounding Raissa’s celebratory barbecue, a sprawling family affair in honor of her acceptance to an American university, Story Artist Tiffany Ford leaned on memories of her own childhood parties with her family of Filipino immigrants. “It was just tables and tables of uncles and aunties and cousins, and everybody’s eating and asking if you ate, telling you to get some food,” she recalls fondly.
For her part, Character Designer Shreya Devarkonda spent hours referencing photos of Filipino faces. The style of the film called for sharp, geometric character designs that felt edgy and modern, but she observed that Filipino features tend to be rounder and softer, so she contrasted the characters’ faces with structured clothing lines and graphic, pointy hair. “I wanted to get the likeness right because we haven’t really seen Filipino characters in animation before,” she says. “I wanted to make them feel authentic.”
This required intricate problem-solving. Take Raissa, whose rig was incredibly heavy, containing more than 8,000 controls. “Between her glasses, long hair, wings, jacket controls, and countless other elements, she was a significant challenge to animate,” says Head of Character Animation Sean Sexton. Because computer graphics wants geometry to flow and tends to make things round and smooth, animating something with multiple angles means that each individual angle must be built into the rig to avoid it losing its edge. This can add hours to an animator’s job.
Nofsinger and the character effects team worked together to find a solution. “They developed a tool that would create model references of where folds were on clothing and hair in various poses. Then they could style the folds on top of the animation,” she explains.
Linework was also essential in maintaining these sharp designs throughout animation. “For example, a jacket might have lines offset from the edges,” says Nofsinger. Then, during moments of action, these lines move, appear, or disappear to emphasize the motion of the sharp edge. This let the characters maintain their geometry even with the big, exaggerated movements used in the film’s comedic and adventure sequences.
Change Is Good
Forgotten Island moves from the real world of the 1990s Philippines to the fantasy island of Nakali, a play on the Tagalog word nakalimutan, which means “to forget.” When this happens, the look of the film changes drastically. Where the Philippines had been warm and homey, Nakali is a burst of neon colorways and the squiggly lines and triangles that dominated the era’s graphic design. “Nakali is a ‘90s rave party, [Jo and Raissa’s] wild last night together,” says Carlson.
When the girls lose their memories of their first night on Nakali and rely on flashbacks from new characters they meet to figure out what happened, the styles continue to change again and again. Each character’s recollection is different, both in look (shifting between varied 2D art styles) and substance (they all tell a conflicting story).
“Their memories reflect their point of view and their personalities,” explains Mercado. The story of Raww, a loner who wants to be cool and buff, is done in the style of Street Fighter, while Prince Mermahn, a glamorous, shallow, romantic party boy, goes full Sailor Moon. Then there’s Bungi, a mama’s boy who weaves his memories in a way that turns the girls’ night into a tapestry. None of the memories prove to be fully accurate, but they can all be combined to resemble the truth.
The climax of the film pushes the question of how to represent memories onscreen to its limits as Jo and Raissa fight a demon who wants to take their memories of each other away for good. The team played with numerous effects: memories shattering into glass, falling apart into Polaroids, and washing away in the waves of a beach. The pièce de résistance is a watercolor effect where the colors fade out of the memories entirely. “We looked at the process of watercolor and how water spreads the color and pigment out onto the [paper], then asked how we would do that in reverse,” says Carlson.
A more concrete way the team explored what it could mean to lose one’s memories was through Manang. The film’s villain, who feeds on memories, is based on The Dreaded Manananggal, an iconic aswang (shape-shifting monster) in Filipino folklore, with the ability to split its body in two. Given the film’s themes of separation, Crawford and Mercado saw it as a natural fit for their story from the start.
Because her body can separate completely, Manang became one of the most complicated characters to rig in DreamWorks’ history, requiring three unique rigs. “She has to function as a whole and separately, plus she also has detachable wings,” explains Crawford. But this severing is about more than what her physical body can do in relation to propelling the action. Manang splitting from herself has symbolic meaning: emotionally, a part of her has been disconnected from her own memories.
When deciding how to resolve Manang’s arc, Crawford and Mercado considered dementia. “People with dementia often feel like outsiders because everyone else knows something they don’t. It turns into anger, paranoia,” says Mercado. This framing allowed them to explore how important memories are to a person’s sense of self.
Through story, design, effects, and animation, Forgotten Island pulls audiences into a world that transforms memories into magic—and reminds viewers how magical they are in the real world, too.
