‘Forgotten Island’ is an Unapologetically Filipino Adventure with Plenty of Heart

DreamWorks Animation’s Forgotten Island begins with the kind of problem no magical creature can easily fix. Your best friend is moving halfway around the world.

Raissa (Liza Soberano) is bound for America, Jo (H.E.R.) is staying in the Philippines, and suddenly years of inside jokes, adventures, and shared memories come with an expiration date. Their solution is to spend one last unforgettable night together, which would be a lovely idea if they were not pulled through a mysterious portal and transported to an island Raissa and Jo have only ever heard about in Jo’s grandmother’s stories.

Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado, Forgotten Island may draw inspiration from The Hangover, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and even Turning Red, but it never feels content to simply imitate them. The film shares Turning Red’s culturally specific approach to growing up and Everything Everywhere All at Once’s ability to use fantastical absurdity to explore migration, family expectations, and the fear of losing someone as life pulls you in different directions.

But what distinguishes Forgotten Island from the rest of the films is how it filters those familiar influences through an unapologetically Filipino lens, using its folklore, visual language, and cultural specificity to tell a deeply personal story about memory and migration while giving the film an identity entirely its own. It is certainly not the first film to have characters retrace their steps after a blurry night of karaoke, spicy food, and new tattoos, nor is it the first to explore the Filipino diaspora, the promise of a brighter future in America, and the generational expectations that often come with leaving home. More significantly, Forgotten Island stands out as a rare major studio animated feature that places Filipino characters, culture, and folklore at the center of its story.

Fortunately, the film understands that cultural specificity begins with its characters. Raissa and Jo are high school graduates who have been best friends since grade school but are now preparing to follow very different paths. Raissa is highly intelligent and future-minded, but also tightly wound and anxious. At the same time, Jo is more free-spirited and likely to dive into adventure headfirst, fueled by the legends and stories passed down by her adoring Lola Fatima (Dolly de Leon). She cooks sinigang, sings karaoke with the kids, and fills Jo and Raissa’s imaginations with vivid stories about Nakalimutan, the mythical island where Aswang rule, and the Manananggal, a vampire-inspired figure that can split her body. Of course, her neighbors and Jo and Raissa’s classmates dismiss those stories as fantasy, but the three know otherwise. This is especially true when they tell the story about the Manang during a class presentation, which has a splash zone for the fake blood that is about to splatter on those sitting in the front row.

Their friendship feels closer to sisterhood, forged through years of shared mischief, rule-breaking, music, and stories. There is even a moment that recalls Dutch and Dillon’s famously aggressive greeting in Predator, only with the expletive conveniently cut short to keep things safely within the boundaries of a family-friendly DreamWorks movie. It is a small joke, but it immediately shows how comfortable these two are with each other.

Of course, things take a turn for Raissa and Jo when it is revealed that Raissa has been accepted into Caltech while Jo will remain at home. Jo is painfully aware that her best friend’s life is about to get bigger while her own feels stuck. That insecurity cuts even deeper when she eavesdrops on Raissa and her mother discussing the future, only to hear Raissa compared to a rocket and Jo to a boulder. It is a cruelly simple metaphor, and one Jo immediately internalizes as proof that Raissa is destined to soar while she is the thing holding her back.

Rather than confront Raissa about what she heard, Jo does what any emotionally wounded teenager with access to questionable decision-making might do. She doubles down on making their final night together one worth remembering. What follows starts innocently enough with karaoke, food, and the kind of reckless spontaneity marked by fireworks and other pyrotechnics that seemed to define their friendship for years. When the reality of their time together running out hits, a mysterious portal opens and the girls tumble into the world of Lola Fatima’s stories, and the night becomes considerably harder to explain.

The next morning is where Forgotten Island’s Hangover influence becomes impossible to miss. Jo and Raissa wake up with little recollection of the previous night and quickly discover that getting home means retracing a trail of increasingly ridiculous decisions documented through Post-it notes and Polaroids scattered across Nakali. Making the night even more questionable, Raissa wakes up with a shaved head, the reasons for which will become clear later, and a pair of wings that refuse to detach themselves from her. Jo, meanwhile, has acquired a new tattoo that may already be infected. Each new stop introduces someone who remembers them far better than they remember themselves, usually with a story the girls would probably prefer remained forgotten.

Helping Raissa and Jo piece together the previous night is a wonderfully strange trio of companions, starting with Rawww (Dave Franco), a classic himbo who also happens to be a were-aspin and serves as their increasingly unreliable guide through Nakalimutan. Often dismissed as nothing more than a dog, Rawww has developed a very canine way of making sure he is remembered. As he puts it, “If I don’t pee on it, no one sees me.” Then there is Bungi Tiyanak (Manny Jacinto), an eight-foot-tall demon baby with three eyes, gigantic cheeks, a cartoonish mustache, and 200 years of life somehow spent perpetually stuck in his terrible twos. His ability to bring his drawings to life helps reconstruct the missing night, while Jacinto gives all of Bungi’s oversized outbursts an endearing childlike innocence. Rounding out the group is Prince Mermahn (Kevin McCann), a handsome merman who seems perpetually thirsty for both water and validation.

For Forgotten Island, memories function as both a narrative device and emotional currency. For two friends whose relationship has been built on years of shared experiences, the possibility of losing those memories gives the adventure an unexpectedly painful edge. That is why it was important for Batiba (Jenny Slate) to be reshaped from a mythological being who enters dreams into one who preys on memories. This change is vital as it plays into the themes of friendship. “An object is just an object until it is imbued with the power of memories. The more powerful the memory, the more powerful the object.”

Raissa and Jo have tied all sorts of charms to a hair tie turned friendship bracelet. Each charm represents a memory that has defined their relationship over the years. While on their own, these charms may seem like ordinary objects, but they carry enormous weight because of the experiences attached to them. These charms can range from vinyl records that represent their shared love of music to the top and bottom halves of the Manananggal that recall the stories they grew up with. There’s even a tiny firecracker that represents their final day together. For Jo and Raissa, losing even one charm means the greatest threat isn’t simply forgetting one chaotic night on Nakali, but potentially losing the shared experiences that made them inseparable in the first place.

Visually, Forgotten Island has an expressive, illustrative quality that feels much closer to anime than anything interested in strict photorealism. Even the way Jo and Raissa react to certain situations has that anime touch. That approach also helps separate Jo and Raissa’s everyday life in Manila from the heightened fantasy of Nakali. Manila carries a warmer, more familiar glow, with colors and textures that feel slightly nostalgic without making the city seem frozen in the past. It draws from Mercado’s own time on the island he once called home. Everything about it has a tangibility that gives the world a lived-in quality, where even the smallest details feel pulled from memory rather than designed to fill the frame.

Nakali pushes the visual further by drawing inspiration from the landscapes of Palawan and El Nido while exploding into graphic linework, black-light imagery, and vivid bursts of cyan and magenta that make the island feel genuinely otherworldly. Even the glowing portal that carries the girls there takes the shape of the sun on the Philippine flag. The visual alone turns what could have been a simple fantasy gateway into another visual reminder of the culture shaping the film.

That cultural specificity extends into how the film represents Manila, not just visually but through its sounds, food, humor, family dynamics, and the everyday rhythms of Jo and Raissa’s lives. From the jeepneys and Raissa’s family fiercely defending the lechon from Jo’s antics to Raissa’s dad commandeering the karaoke machine and Lola Fatima serving sinigang while filling the girls’ heads with stories. It’s those details that give Forgotten Island a sense of place that feels affectionate, familiar, and unmistakably Filipino.

That Filipino identity is just as carefully considered in the film’s music. Composer Nathan Matthew David blends the traditional orchestra with Indigenous Filipino instruments, voices, and rhythms, allowing the sound of the film to transform once Jo and Raissa enter Nakali. Even the score refuses to define Jo and Raissa entirely as individuals. Their central musical motif belongs to their relationship. Rather than using those instruments merely to make the fantasy world sound exotic, the score gives them specific narrative meaning. Batiba’s music incorporates the rarely played T’boli sludoy, an instrument whose own history makes it an especially fitting choice for a character obsessed with memory. At the same time, the Manananggal are accompanied by Gandingan talking gongs that can communicate actual phrases through rhythm. This is another example of how deeply Filipino culture is woven into the film rather than simply placed on top of it.

For Filipino families, Raissa’s departure carries a familiarity that extends well beyond the usual coming-of-age story. The Philippines has a long history of overseas Filipino workers leaving home for work and greater opportunities abroad, often stretching families and friendships across countries and time zones. That reality gives Raissa’s move to America added emotional weight, especially in the mix of excitement, uncertainty, guilt, and fear that comes with leaving someone behind. Forgotten Island understands that going away can represent an exciting new beginning for one person while feeling painfully close to abandonment for the person who stays.

As for the most important part of the film, the SEAsterhood between Raissa and Jo gives Forgotten Island its emotional center. Soberano and H.E.R. voice these characters as if they were long-time friends. It may have to do with the fact that they are Filipino, so they recognize the responsibility of being in a film of this significance.

For a film called Forgotten Island, there is very little here that feels destined to be forgotten. Crawford and Mercado have created a vibrant, funny, and deeply personal fantasy that draws its strength from how specifically Filipino it is, from the folklore and food to the music, family dynamics, and familiar experience of watching someone leave home. Some of its slang like the Tayo Na (which translates to Let’s Go! in English), cultural references, and visual details may go over the heads of audiences unfamiliar with Filipino culture, but that specificity is precisely what makes its emotions feel so universal. Even if it is heavily Filipino-coded, Forgotten Island uses universal themes everyone can relate to. As such, it understands that growing up often means moving toward something new, but it does not require abandoning the people, places, and memories that helped shape us along the way. If anything, those memories are what make the journey forward worth taking.

Verdict: 9/10