Movie Review: ‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’

On its surface, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is like any number of other films we’ve already seen: An awkward teenager tries to fit in, winds up humiliated, but then discovers that they’re special in their own way. With a variation here or there, the template can accommodate everything from She’s All That to Cinderella to Spider-Man to Carrie. In the case of this movie, however, like the title says, our nerdy, lovesick 15-year-old heroine (voiced by Lana Condor) isn’t just wondering whom she can ask out to prom or if the popular new girl at school will befriend her or why her parents are so strict with her. She’s also a kraken.

There are different kinds of weird. Some movies are weird due to a surfeit of imagination; the filmmakers, we sense, have worked overtime to come up with more and more creative, unpredictable ideas. Then there are those films that are weird for the opposite reason: because the people behind them appear to have run out of ideas. Sea monsters have been all the rage in animation of late, but there’s a world of difference between the fully realized universes of The Sea Beast and Luca and something like Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which feels like a fake movie we might glimpse in a satire about how creatively bankrupt Hollywood is. At the same time, it’s a fake film that we can sort of imagine actually wanting to see: Wait, she’s a kraken? The ancient, mythical, ship-eating giant octopus of Scandinavian sailor lore? Okay, what’s that going to be like?

Weird. It’s going to be weird. I’m not sure at what point I realized I was watching what might be the strangest movie of the year. Maybe it had to do with Ruby’s parents hiding from their kids the fact that they are a family of krakens. Or the fact that Ruby is told her family is not allowed into the ocean even though they live in a seaside village. This is not any seaside village, mind you; it’s a village where everything is sea-based. Every single school trip is to the water. The prom is being held on a boat. “Why do you live next to the water?” someone asks Ruby’s mom, Agatha (voiced by Toni Collette). “We needed to stay moist,” she says.

Ruby doesn’t know she’s a kraken at first. She just knows to wear turtlenecks to cover up her gills lest she be mocked at school. When she’s embarrassed, one of her legs wraps tentacularly around the other. Is the latter an actual, odd character feature, or is it just part of the slippery, trippy animation style of the movie? That, too, is hard to tell. The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks. Even when our heroine transforms into a mountainous, terrifying undersea beast, it’s hard to tell what she’s supposed to look like. Her hair is made of tentacles, but her enormous fingers have suckers on them. What exactly do the people who made this movie think a kraken looks like? Ruby looks as if a drunk person tried to draw Cthulhu from memory.

Ruby Gillman tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a poppy, colorful, neon teen fantasia — a frivolous comedy with simple bursts of romantic longing, encomiums to enduring friendships, and gentle conflicts with overprotective parents. At the same time, there’s a whiff of civilizational defeat to its devil-may-care high concept. By making the teen heroine (I still can’t believe I’m typing this) a kraken, and not a particularly well-realized kraken at that, the movie undercuts the familiar sweetness of its premise in the cruelest way. It reminds us that nothing really matters. Ruby Gillman might seem like an unassuming little animated film — a trifling, family-friendly time-waster — but at some point, expect a moment of clarity that reveals how utterly absurd this whole endeavor is. And by “whole endeavor,” I mean life itself.