Robinson Crusoe movie review: More frills, less thrills

Cast: Ben Stassen, Vincent Kesteloot
Voices of: Yuri Lowenthal, David Howard, Laila Berzins, Joey Camen, Sandy Fox

 

Animation is a technical achievement of the entertainment industry but that does not necessarily mean everything that is animated would be good. Case in point is the 2016 version of the Robinson Crusoe story. While this is a timeless piece of fiction, and there have been numerous adaptations of it, this one does not feel quite good. It seems like this Robinson Crusoe has reached the island fully aware of the story and how it might unfold. One has to understand that this is first and foremost a story of a man who might have been a recluse, who ended up on an island after a shipwreck and everyone barring him had perished. Whether in the story Robinson Crusoe is rescued from the island or not is inconsequential, because what he managed while on the island is far more important.

The centrality of the story lies in the human spirit of survival, resolution and hope. While the 2016 film tries to take a different viewpoint it fails on several fronts.
For starters, the animals on the island are all unary. There is one parrot, an old goat, a pig, a porcupine, a platypus, a lizard and another small birdie. It is not possible for such an arbitrary group of animals to be present with no other member of their own species. Are we to believe that these were all washed ashore, one by one, on the island? If so, how did they learn their basic instincts, how did the parrot learn to fly?

Even in the animal kingdom, parents coach their infants; they are fed and looked after. But in this case, it seems the animals had just appeared magically in an arbitrary manner and were some how in one pack with absolutely no regard to the ecosystem in which a certain species might survive. By that magic, I wonder why there was not a single carnivore? In the creation of the fictional universe one cannot simply ignore the factors, it has to have its own logic and the logic has to be believable at every instance. This one is simply not.

In the story, Robinson has a really tough time when he lands on the island, he builds his shelter, manages his survival and after a long wait he discovers Tuesday. In this movie however, one does not feel the pain of Robinson. Tuesday is an overtly eager parrot that for some reason has a belief that there is a world out there, which would be worth discovering. There seems to be no reason for him to have that belief, even humans took centuries to figure out that earth was not the only thing in the universe. So a parrot that had just grown out of the ground, or maybe fell from the sky with no generational history has no logical basis to think of a world outside, but he does.

In similar attempts to represent the animal world, most filmmakers have tried to construct a whole ecosystem in which their existence and humanisation seems possible, in this one, they have simply ignored it. If one were to watch it with the assumptions that the filmmaker wants us to, even then, the construction seems to fall flat. The only thing the movie seems to be capable of doing is raising some interest in the original story, so the children can find it interesting to read the original novel. However, with very little intrigue about the fate of Robinson Crusoe, one does not feel that the interest can be aroused either and if it does, then those who pick up the original text might feel a little cheated. Finally a good 3D animation is no more a novelty, unless it is a performance that deserves it.

The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society