Animated 'Red Turtle' embraces nature, silence

When was the last time an animated film actual lowered your pulse rate?

In its typical Hollywood form, an animated feature is usually the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush - a frantic barrage of colors and movement and jokes and sounds.

It's safe to say that "The Red Turtle," a collaboration between Japan's famed Studio Ghibli and Dutch animator-director Michael Dudok de Wit, is very, very different. A fable, beautifully drawn in calm, soothing colors, it doesn't even have dialogue. Those sounds you hear are the sounds of silence, and eventually they become hypnotic.

The film begins with a roiling sea. A man is lost; we don't know how he got there. Finally, he washes up on a tranquil island, inhabited seemingly only by a few friendly crabs on the beach.

Exploring the rocky cliffs, he slips and falls into a crevasse, and seems about to drown in the water below when he steels his nerves, dives deeper down, and finds a way out. Slowly, in this way, he learns how to cope with the forces of nature around him.

There are some lovely greens and blues and grays here, but unlike many animated films, the palette is limited and the colors fairly muted. It's beautiful, but we also know that the man - we don't know his name - aches to find a way back to civilization.

He builds a raft and sets sail, only to have some unknown underwater force - could it be a shark? - destroy it and send him gasping to the shore. He rebuilds the raft and tries again, but the same force destroys it once more. It turns out this is no shark, but a big, beautiful red turtle that is thwarting our man's dream of escape. But why? And how will this confrontation end?

It's tempting to continue recounting the plot here, but this is one of those films where the less you know beforehand, the better. Suffice it to say that as our main character learns to be patient with nature, we too sense the need to slow down and wait for our own gratification.