Film / music / memory
Please Don’t Forget the Words
Forgotten Island, karaoke, and the beautiful mess of remembering each other
There is something pleasing about emerging from a Monday-morning cinema screening, towards the end of a film’s theatrical run, feeling that you have discovered something you might easily have missed.
Forgotten Island inspires that particular affection. Here is an extravagant, occasionally overwhelming animated adventure whose strangest achievement is how familiar it can feel. Somewhere between its supernatural creatures, mixtapes, karaoke and emotional upheavals, it starts resembling a room you have been in before.
Possibly a room in which several relatives are talking simultaneously, somebody has misunderstood something, and the misunderstanding is already becoming the accepted version of events.
My immediate description was “Studio Ghibli with Tim Burton on speed”. I stand by the enthusiasm, if not necessarily the precision. The film has an appetite for the grotesque, a fondness for enchanted worlds and an energy level that occasionally makes keeping up feel like an additional admission requirement.
But beneath the commotion is a surprisingly delicate question: how do you preserve a relationship when neither person can remain exactly who they were?
The film’s threatened loss of memory gives that question a fantastical form. Its cultural details make it recognisable.
The family version of events
The Filipino touches were among its greatest pleasures for me: names, turns of phrase, pronunciations, karaoke, lumpia, jeepneys. These offer the immediate delight of recognition—the small excitement of hearing something familiar addressed to an entire cinema.
More revealing, though, is the behaviour. The family gossip. The selective hearing. The tendency to interpret an announcement according to whichever outcome would be most desirable.
The joke works because the misunderstanding has a direction. People hear the story they want to inhabit.
That suggests a useful way into a film preoccupied with memory. Remembering someone is never an entirely neutral activity. We retain certain versions of them: the childhood friend, the promising student, the person who always makes everyone laugh. Affection can make these versions especially difficult to revise.
A family’s preferred account of your life can be loving, hilarious and faintly suffocating at once.
Friendship has its own versions of this problem. The person who knows your history best may struggle when you begin imagining a future they cannot yet picture themselves inside.
Read this way, the domestic comedy and the larger fantasy belong together. Both concern the distance between who someone is becoming and who other people need them to remain.
Who owns a song?
The soundtrack carries a similar tension between inheritance and reinvention.
Its familiar pop songs evoke the 1980s and 1990s, but their appeal goes beyond recognising the decade. A song can preserve the circumstances in which you first loved it: the room, the company, the person who put it on a tape.
A mixtape makes that process deliberate. Someone chooses an order and offers another person a sequence of feelings. Years later, the music can retain the relationship even when the relationship itself has changed.
Karaoke makes this private attachment public.
A song written elsewhere becomes part of a family’s repertoire. It acquires somebody’s pronunciation, somebody’s exaggerated delivery, somebody’s determination to attempt a note that has defeated them every Christmas.
The original recording remains available. The remembered version belongs to the people in the room.
That is why the film’s mixture of Western pop and Filipino life feels so persuasive. Cultural identity includes the things people adopt, repeat and transform through use. The soundtrack’s official release likewise brings together Nathan Matthew David’s score and performers including H.E.R., Liza Soberano, BINI, SB19, Ruby Ibarra and Lea Salonga. Its musical world encompasses several forms of Filipino and Filipino American expression. [1]
For me, the pleasure of hearing “This Is How We Do It” sits within that larger experience: recognising music from a particular period while recognising the social life surrounding it.
The songs help explain why losing shared memories would hurt. You would lose the person who understands why that particular song makes you laugh before the chorus has even started.
When the noise begins to mean something
The opening stretch can be exhausting. My first response was that its energy occasionally outran my ability to absorb it, although I would like another viewing before deciding how firmly that criticism holds.
There is a danger in explaining away every excess as intentional. An emotional justification does not automatically improve the rhythm of an individual scene.
Nevertheless, the more introspective middle changes how the surrounding frenzy feels.
Once the friendship has acquired greater emotional weight, the returning chaos has something to carry. Movement, accumulation and visual overload begin expressing the difficulty of holding on.
The proliferating Post-its brought Brazil to mind for me. I would describe that as an association rather than a confirmed quotation. But it opens an interesting comparison: the attempt to organise experience can become so excessive that the organising material threatens to overwhelm the person using it.
Here, that image acquires a more tender possibility. A reminder is evidence that somebody anticipated forgetting and tried to intervene.
One note is practical. An engulfing mass of them starts looking like fear.
The later spectacle consequently felt more poetic to me than the opening rush. By then, the film had supplied a reason to care about what might disappear beneath the noise.
Recognition without an explanation
Seeing Filipino culture occupy this much space in a mainstream animated film brings its own excitement.
I thought of Ned’s lola addressing Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man in No Way Home: the pleasure of encountering a familiar family presence inside an enormous Hollywood production.
Forgotten Island extends that recognition across an entire imaginative world. Filipino folklore is foundational to its adventure, rather than a brief encounter within somebody else’s story. [2]
Yet the smallest recognitions may matter most. Food can be identified and mythology explained. The particular way somebody’s family mishears an announcement is harder to put in a cultural introduction.
It registers through timing, tone and accumulated experience.
There is pleasure in finding a film that trusts those details to be funny without pausing to explain why you might recognise them.
The person who remembers with you
The Letterboxd description I encountered before seeing it—“eternal sunshine of the Filipino mind”—is wonderfully economical. It catches the conjunction of memory, emotional attachment and fantastical disorder.
But friendship gives that conjunction a particular poignancy.
Friends become witnesses to versions of ourselves that would otherwise survive only in our own account. They remember the embarrassing enthusiasm, the private joke, the song played far too often. Their presence confirms that a shared period of life happened.
Growing apart can therefore feel like losing access to part of your own history.
The film’s creative connection to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is direct: Joel Crawford, Januel Mercado and producer Mark Swift return from that production. The resemblance you sensed has a concrete foundation. [3] Here, though, the anxiety that stayed with me concerns the vulnerability of being remembered by another person.
Perhaps that is why its untidiness feels appropriate even when its pacing becomes difficult. Shared lives contain ridiculous material alongside their deepest feelings. An absurd name, an old pop song and a moment of genuine grief can occupy the same memory.
I came away wanting to revisit the film, partly to reconsider the opening, and partly to spend more time with the things its speed almost concealed.
Its most affecting idea is that remembering somebody involves more than retaining information about them.
Sometimes it means knowing when to come in on the chorus.