Forgotten Island's directors unpack their 'very personal' anime references

Sailor Moon, Street Fighter, and Dragon Ball all get their Easter egg moments

Most of the new adventure movie Forgotten Island is animated in the style that’s become very familiar to fans of Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks. The characters and settings are three-dimensional, with a lot of attention paid to convincing textures, depth, lighting, and shadows. But at several points throughout the movie, all of that falls away in favor of flat, simple 2D animation that will be familiar to fans of ’90s anime, in particular. Whenever the characters tell stories about past experiences, their versions of events play out on the screen in comedically exaggerated visuals taken directly from Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Street Fighter.

Writer-directors Januel P. Mercado and Joel Crawford tell Polygon they drew on those three anime series in particular because of their own childhood fandoms.

“Those are staples of ’90s animation, and those were our formative years, growing up in that decade,” Mercado says. “So we were quick to go to those as very personal, special references for the movie.”

Those sequences also specifically reflect the perspectives of the characters telling each story, like the were-dog Raww (Dave Franco), kataw Prince Mermahn (Kevin McCann), and Bungi the blue-skinned, three-eyed tiyanak (The Acolyte’s Manny Jacinto).

“They line up with the characters who are telling those moments — their personalities,” Crawford says. “They each have their own worldview. And picking a style that really showcases that was fun.”

According to Mercado, the choice of which character would line up with which anime series came well after the scripting stage. For instance, Raww was already established as a vain, excitable character. It was an easy step to imagine how he visualizes himself — as a hyperbolically tough, powerful Street Fighter-style warrior.

“We had a good handle on the characters already,” Mercado says. “And then when we started thinking about the stuff that influenced us — there was so much out there, you know? Going deeper on Street Fighter and Dragon Ball for Raww, it's like, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ We were joking, ‘Our 10-year-old selves, this is the kind of movie we would have made. And that we're actually making right now! Just, like, muscles on muscles."

“One of the [visual development] artists, Kalen Chock — as soon as we told him the Street Fighter reference, he took it and turned it up,” Crawford laughs. “It's so cool how collaborative animation is, that everybody's bringing a part of themselves to this.”

“Quick story on that concept artist,” Mercado adds. “He designed a lot of the final look for Raww's flashback. He was obviously inspired by, like, Marvel vs. Capcom. And he was having so much fun with it, he says his wife walked in and was like, ‘I thought you were supposed to be working. What are you doing?’ [Laughs] She thought he was just messing around, drawing for fun. He's like, ‘I am working.’"

It was a really cool opportunity to have a Filipino studio bring their craft and themselves to this story celebrating Filipino culture.

Many studios have adapted their software suites and animation pipelines toward producing animation in the glossy, textured style that Pixar pioneered. That’s left recent animation directors “fighting the machine” when they want more exaggerated, dramatic, mold-breaking imagery or designs. But Crawford says producing the anime-style sequences wasn’t difficult for DreamWorks, because they outsourced them.

“We were really fortunate in [being able to use] Snipple Animation Studios in the Philippines,” he says. “That studio did all the 2D animated moments, and that’s their wheelhouse. Snipple has, for decades, worked on so much TV in the U.S., so much TV animation in Japan. So it was a really cool opportunity to have a Filipino studio bring their craft and themselves to this story celebrating Filipino culture.”

Forgotten Island is in theaters now.