Kirk DeMicco’s Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken feels torn between being a story of racial difference and offering a compelling vision of teenage growing pains. Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing, which is apt insofar as its main character, a 15-year-old champion mathlete named Ruby (Lana Condor), is trying to understand her place in the world.
Ruby goes through high school wondering why her parents, Agatha (Toni Collette) and Arthur (Colman Domingo), are so strict about keeping her away from sea water. And, unfortunately for Ruby, that includes not being able to attend her high school prom, as it’s set to take place on a massive cruise ship in the ocean. One day, while flirting with Connor (Jaboukie Young-White), Ruby accidentally pushes her would-be paramour into the ocean, and upon diving in after him comes to realize what her parents have kept hidden from her: that she’s a kraken.
Another one of the rules that our Floridian teen protagonist has to obey—that she claim to be Canadian if someone asks why she’s blue—makes for Teenage Kraken’s funniest moment, but the hit-to-miss ratio of the film’s humor is otherwise low. Comparisons to Pixar’s Luca and Turning Red are inevitable and not far off base, and while they do the film no favors, the character designs and environments can be delightful on their own terms.
The town of Oceanside that Ruby calls home and the underwater realm where she meets her Grandmamah (Jane Fonda) and learns of her royal lineage are alive with iridescent seafoam greens, cobalt blues, and more. And befitting the myth of the kraken and one such creature learning to affirm her difference, the filmmakers lean into the otherworldly, as Teenage Kraken’s characters are rendered in a charmingly diverse array of shapes, colors, and sizes.
But however winning it is on a moment-to-moment basis—namely in the way it captures the frenetic energy of teenage angst—Teenage Kraken doesn’t shake up convention. From the new it-girl at Oceanside High, Chelsea Van Der Zee (Annie Murphy), whose revealed to be a mermaid with a sinister agenda, to Gordon Lighthouse (Will Forte), a craggly seaman out to slay a kraken and prove that his 30-year Moby Dick-inspired journey is not for naught, the film is a traffic jam of hastily and conveniently introduced characters.
Seeing Ruby’s anxiety over having her kraken-hood revealed by her very-online classmates is relatable enough, and her political awareness is given admirable expression in a moment in which she and her mother argue about the proper time to fight for an equitable world. But Teenage Kraken can be shameless in its pandering, especially all the messaging about honest self-expression and tolerance aimed at Gen Zers, as in a moment when prom is described as “a post-colonial, patriarchal construct.” And the film’s frequent montages set to rap and pop music only emphasize the fundamentally rushed nature of the storytelling.
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