Kensuke’s Kingdom: a rapturous British castaway fable

Few of us took to the high seas during the Covid pandemic, but that breach with normality, with its various ensuing experiences of isolation, precarity, reappraisal and discovery, are the closest we’re likely to come to being marooned on a desert island. Which is to say that this pellucid animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 1999 novel about a pre-teen castaway sharing an otherwise unoccupied south Pacific island with a long-lost Japanese World War II survivor, Kensuke, is not only a trim and swift-running young fantasy adventure that subtly reorients the genre, but a fable with a familiar undertow of feeling. If the island young Michael washes up on serves as a sandbox for his moral maturation and renewal of values, the knotty human world he has all but left behind looms as the film’s negative space, a very imperfect world worth our investment of love and care. It may be coincidence that production began early in the pandemic – co-producer Sarah Radclyffe had been developing the project for two decades; co-directors Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry signed on ten years ago – but the connection feels strong.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s screenplay sets straight to sea, Michael’s family of four manning the decks with gusto as the wind fills the sails of the Peggy Sue and carries them oceanward: a fleeting mention of Mum and Dad having lost their jobs is their only backward glance. The animation style likewise seems at first to take flight from the modern, globalised CG standard: hand-drawn 2D characters and foregrounds, along with the traditional middle-class English family unit (voiced by Sally Hawkins, Cillian Murphy, Aaron MacGregor and Raffey Cassidy as Michael’s big sister, Becky) evoke an old-fashioned English adventure yarn.

In fact, there’s nothing antique about the animation, which deftly mixes different styles and media across the film’s different spaces and stages. It is particularly imaginative in the way it leans on the characters’ artistic skills: Michael’s ship’s-log drawings come alive as kids’ pencil animation on an origami paper boat which traverses the map. Later there will be a devastating animated montage using Hiroshige-inspired ink line drawings, with a teardrop of ink from a paused paintbrush hitting the page and blasting through its delicate compositions like the Nagasaki atom bomb through Kensuke’s imagination and memories. Boyle and Hendry both have history working in hand-drawn animation with Sylvain Chomet, the French director of Belleville Rendezvous (2003) and The Illusionist (2010); Boyle was mentored by the late, great Richard Williams, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to The Animator’s Survival Kit Animated (2008). The co-production company, Lupus Films, previously made the Raymond Briggs adaption Ethel & Ernest (2016), as well as a medley of fluid and fanciful TV featurettes from kids’ books, including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (2016) and The Tiger Who Came to Tea (2019).

Below deck, Michael is the one family member unreconciled to the voyage, brooding on their dog, Stella, banned by Dad from joining them. The screenplay snips and adds a few details to Morpurgo’s story, turning Michael’s past-tense narration to frequently wordless action and bringing out his juvenile irresponsibility and defiance through details such as his refusal to keep his safety harness attached on deck – a bad idea mid-storm. On the island, he’s still careless but needy, vulnerable but proud – but his intrusion on Kensuke’s gruff self-sufficiency opens a window of faith in the older man, too.

This is one of two wild-isle animation adaptations this year, coming two months before DreamWorks’ CG production The Wild Robot, in which nature and technology build back better without human oversight. In Kensuke’s Kingdom, isolated humans do their own bedding down with nature: the film clasps loving details of local fauna, from rock fish to flying squirrels to orangutans – more Gorillas in the Mist (1988) than the libertarian fantasies of other tropical island stories; poachers’ boots and the sound of loading rifles here stand for capitalist greed and trespass. Like the protagonists of The Red Turtle or Moana (both 2016), Michael wants away from the island, but he also comes to appreciate its powers of sanctuary, and to respect and invest in life’s cycle of mutuality and care. The film conjures that with its own deft mix of beauty, economy, discreet drama, rapture and delicacy.

 ► Kensuke’s Kingdom is in UK cinemas 2 August.