DreamWorks Forgotten Island Movie Review and Plot Analysis: Why This 2026 Family Adventure is a Must-Watch
Every so often an animated movie shows up that nobody asked for, and then you realize it’s exactly what you wanted. Forgotten Island looks like that kind of movie.
DreamWorks Animation and Universal open it in US theaters tomorrow, September 25. It’s an original story with no sequel number, no toy line to justify it, and no fairy-tale princess. It’s about two best friends, a magical island, and the quiet dread of drifting apart from someone you love. Frankly, that’s scarier than most of what passes for horror in kids’ movies.
The Setup: One Last Night, One Terrible Portal
It’s the late 1990s, somewhere in the Philippines. Jo is a music-obsessed dreamer. Raissa is her loyal, slightly overprotective best friend. They’re celebrating what’s supposed to be their final night together before family stuff and life in general pull them in different directions. Anyone who’s had a childhood best friend move away knows that feeling in the stomach.
Then they wander off, find an ancient portal, and get yanked into Nakali.
Here’s the hook that sold me. Nakali isn’t just a pretty fantasy island full of weird creatures. It eats memories. The longer you stay, the more of your past it strips away: the secrets, the small happy moments, the stuff that makes you you. And what it wants most from Jo and Raissa is the memory of each other.
So it’s a race. Escape before the island erases your friendship, or walk out the other side as strangers who happen to share a face. I’ll say it plainly: that’s a brilliant engine for a family movie. The monster isn’t a villain with a laser. It’s time and distance, dressed up as a jungle.
The Team Behind the Curtain
Directing are Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado. Crawford gave us The Croods: A New Age and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and if you’ve seen the second one you know he can make a talking cat contemplate mortality without losing the jokes. Mercado is a Filipino-American filmmaker making his major theatrical directing debut here, and by all accounts he brought a lot of himself to the material.
Mark Swift produces, and Nathan Matthew David handles the score, which reportedly mixes orchestral sweep with Filipino instruments and some nineties pop flavor. That last part gets me. Give me a movie that knows what a 1998 playlist felt like.
Quick Cast Rundown
| Actor | Role / Vibe |
|---|---|
| H.E.R. | Jo, the music-loving dreamer who uses song to hold onto her memories |
| Liza Soberano | Raissa, the fiercely loyal best friend |
| Lea Salonga | A guiding spirit of the island (yes, that voice) |
| Manny Jacinto | A fast-talking, unreliable native guide |
| Dave Franco & Jenny Slate | Mismatched spirits who’ve already lost chunks of their own memories |
| Dolly de Leon, Jo Koy, Ronny Chieng | Extra comedic muscle |
I want to linger on two of these. Casting H.E.R. as a girl who fights memory loss with music is such a natural fit that it almost feels unfair to the rest of Hollywood. And Franco and Slate as a bickering duo of memory-scrambled spirits is either going to be the funniest thing in the movie or the saddest. Probably both. They’re a walking warning label for what happens if Jo and Raissa lose.
Why the Folklore Matters More Than You’d Think
A lot of studio movies borrow a culture’s aesthetic and call it representation. Nice costumes, a few words in the dialogue, done. What’s being said about Forgotten Island suggests something different.
The film is built around bayanihan, the Filipino idea of communal cooperation, of people pitching in together to move something too heavy for one person. (The classic image is neighbors literally carrying a house on their shoulders.) In the movie, that value isn’t a background detail. It’s the answer to the island’s puzzle. Jo and Raissa can’t muscle or outsmart their way out of Nakali alone. They have to trust each other and lean on the history the island is trying to steal.
Think about how neat that is. The threat is forgetting each other, and the solution is relying on each other. The theme and the plot are the same thing, which is exactly how good animated storytelling works.
For anyone who grew up in a Filipino household, or in any immigrant family where two worlds bump into each other at the dinner table, I can imagine this landing hard. Seeing these creatures and customs treated with respect on a giant global screen is a big deal.
How It Looks
DreamWorks has been on a stylistic tear lately, ditching glossy photorealism for something more painterly, and Forgotten Island seems to push that further.
The real-world 1990s scenes lean into warm amber tones with a touch of film grain, like a photo you found in a shoebox. Then Nakali kicks in and the palette goes wild: neon glow, deep purples, electric blues, emerald jungle. The island reportedly shifts with the characters’ emotions, and when it swallows a memory, the image dissolves like watercolor running under a tap.
That detail is what gets me. Losing a memory is treated as something beautiful and sad at the same time. That’s a hard tone to hit in a movie meant for eight-year-olds and their exhausted parents.
Action, meanwhile, is said to favor clean, wide tracking shots over the frantic cut-cut-cut style that makes family movies feel like a blender. If you’ve ever lost track of a fight scene in a kids’ movie, you know why that matters.
What Critics and the Internet Are Saying
Early reactions are strong, though I’ll keep my feet on the ground.
- IndieWire landed on a B, praising the cultural specificity and the way the film blends silly comedy with heavier themes about memory, aging, and grief.
- DiscussingFilm went bigger, calling it one of DreamWorks’ best and most original efforts, with particular love for the chemistry between H.E.R. and Soberano and for a portrayal of female friendship that feels sincere.
A B is a solid grade, not a rave, and I like that the conversation isn’t pure hype. Meanwhile, online, the mood is loud. The trailers pulled in millions of views fast. YouTube film channels keep comparing the memory-eating concept to Inside Out, usually adding that this one looks faster and more action-driven. Reddit’s r/movies and r/Animation threads keep circling the same point: DreamWorks is on a legitimate hot streak, and the Puss in Boots 2 team getting another swing at an original idea has people optimistic. TikTok has been running trailer audio and fan edits under #ForgottenIsland and #DreamWorks2026, which is how a “kids’ movie” starts pulling teens and twenty-somethings into theaters.
September 25, 2026 Movie Guide: Forgotten Island, Heart of the Beast, and Every Major Family Release
Why I’m Going In Excited
Let me be straight about what pulls me in.
- It’s original. In a landscape stacked with sequels and reboots, a new IP with real stakes feels almost rebellious.
- The emotional idea is universal. You don’t need to be Filipino, or a kid, to understand losing touch with someone who once knew everything about you.
- The cast is stacked without feeling like a stunt. Names like Salonga and H.E.R. bring real musical weight, not just marquee value.
- It has a point of view. It’s specific about place, time, and culture, and specificity is usually what makes a story hit everybody.
Will It Win the Weekend?
Box office is a guessing game, and I’m not going to pretend to have a crystal ball. What I can say is that the early fall window looks pretty friendly for family animation, with little direct competition, and the mix of decent reviews, loud online buzz, and multi-generational appeal is the recipe studios dream about. If word of mouth follows the trailers, this could be a long-legged hit rather than a one-weekend blip.
Either way, my plan is simple: go see it, bring someone you’ve known forever, and pay attention to how you feel when the credits roll. If it makes you want to text your oldest friend, the movie did its job.
