REVIEW: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023)

"I'm not a monster; I'm a kraken!"

Movie Reviews

I didn’t know about Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken until the trailers started flowing. However, I was immediately encouraged by the colorful designs and unique concepts. I also like Lana Condor and Toni Collette, and DreamWorks had a fantastic year in 2022. In short, I was firmly on board to give this movie a fair shake. It had to be better than Elemental, at least, right? Right? Hello?

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken follows the eponymous heroine (Lana Condor) as she balances high school problems with her newfound kraken heritage and powers. Matters are complicated by her mother (Toni Collette) withholding information and the emergence of a new friend, Chelsea the Mermaid (Annie Murphy). Ruby finds encouragement from her grandmother (Jane Fonda) as she learns to harness her abilities to pursue kraken-mermaid peace. 

The best aspect of Ruby Gillman is undoubtedly the animation. It’s fluid (pun possibly intended), inventive, bright, and colorful. At times, the last two are more of a negative point; seriously, this movie gave me big “toddler scribbling all over the walls” vibes. I like the painterly but restrained style of The Bad Guys and The Last Wish infinitely more. I respect Ruby’s look for its cartooniness and experimental quality, but it shouldn’t be DreamWorks’ new standard. As far as the characters go, they’re ugly. The mermaid is the only visually appealing character. I guess they want to build sympathy for Ruby by giving her a hot frenemy and making her homely by comparison, but the reverse psychology didn’t work on me. Any time Chelsea is onscreen, she steals the show. The vocal performance by Annie Murphy is cringy and stereotypical, but I don’t blame her. This was clearly the character’s intended direction, and she did her job. Regardless, I don’t understand even making regular humans unappealing. Lots of cartoons do this nowadays; fair or not, I associate it with Illumination. I’m not saying they all need to be waifu material; that would be weird, too. But I like to look at things that are aesthetically pleasing. 

The musical score is unremarkable, but the pop songs are abundant, annoying, and ill-suited in some cases. This is another gripe I have with some modern animated movies: stop trying so hard to be cool and relevant. That stuff doesn’t stand the test of time; it’s very timely and, therefore, never timeless. It may seem strange to question the potential staying power of a movie that came out two days ago. But context matters to me, and animation has repeatedly proven to produce timeless classics. It’s not my favorite movie, but Shrek is still hugely popular over two decades later. DreamWorks is capable of this as much as Disney, who aren’t doing so hot themselves at the moment. I think Encanto has this potential, but nothing they’ve put out since then. This brings me nicely to something I didn’t expect to have to say: this movie is actually worse than Elemental. They both squander good animation and creativity on trite, boring stories and bland characters. But Elemental is superior visually despite Ruby being more cartoony, which I prefer in general. Elemental has good intentions, even if we can poke holes in the worldbuilding and question the execution. Ruby Gillman pits women against women in the same old mean girls story we’re tired of; I’ll get back to this. Despite Elemental being full of element puns and few jokes actually landing, Ruby is worse off comedically as well. This movie is definitely, 100% aimed at younger kids. There’s no harm in that, but this movie doesn’t even try to win over families or older animation fans. I can already imagine preteens rolling their eyes at the attempts to be hip and current with TikTok trends. They consistently go for the low-hanging fruit with jokes and observations about society and familial relationships. Elemental and Ruby also share a trait in the thematic exploration of how families can pass trauma down from one generation to the next and so on. Are you tired of hearing me talk about this in animated movie reviews? Not as tired as I am of watching it. We get it. You know the drill, Encanto did it better, it’s been driven into the ground, etc. Ruby Gillman even stars Jaboukie Young-White as Ruby’s love interest Connor; White previously voiced Ethan, the lead character in Disney’s Strange World. That film came out almost a year ago. I was tired of animated family movies focusing on this long before then. 

Speaking of Connor, he’s boring, and we don’t know anything about him. He likes Ruby, and she taught him how to do math. If you expected him to be important to the film based on the trailers, sorry. He’s not in it much and doesn’t learn, grow, or do much at all. This film really fails its male characters. That may sound like an odd critique, but they’re mostly dumb or inept and always used for comedic relief. Ruby’s dad Arthur (Colman Domingo) escapes this to an extent, but he doesn’t affect the story much. Ruby’s tension with her mom, who has problems with her mom (Turning Red much?), drives the story. However, I don’t think this is a case of sexism, at least not intentionally; I think the movie is just poorly written. Despite being exclusively in the spotlight, Ruby Gillman’s female characters don’t make out any better. As I said, this is a “mean girls” setup where Chelsea is using her and will betray her despite being kind and patient with Ruby initially. By the way, I like mermaids, and making the mermaid the best-designed character and giving her awesome powers didn’t change my mind. This movie borders on anti-mermaid propaganda, which is a strange stance to take. I know about sirens luring men to their deaths, but this movie doesn’t even take that angle. It boils down to “pretty, popular girls are mean and fake” and “weird, smart girls are awesome.” We don’t even learn why Ruby is weird, aside from being a kraken (which she doesn’t know at the beginning) and liking math. The latter isn’t that weird; that’s actually really great and could lead to a solid career. The movie’s conflict also arises from Agatha (Collette) over-parenting her daughter, just like her mom did to her. But the movie doesn’t solve this problem; it ultimately ignores it. All three generations team up to defeat the mermaid, and they decide “mother knows best,” unless she doesn’t, in the case of Fonda’s grandmama. I’m a lost toy. This movie is absurdly simple, but in the end, I don’t really know what they want kids to learn from it. 

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is a big disappointment. It’s so bad I feel embarrassed for thinking it looked good. Heck, Elemental was aggressively mediocre, so I assumed it had to be the weakest mainstream American animated movie of the year, and DreamWorks just blew it out of the water. It’s harmless enough despite promoting the same old stereotypes and female drama. Still, it’s utterly braindead and has nothing new or exciting to say. This one exists purely to babysit your kids for you, and I’d wait for streaming even if you want to see it.