I went into Forgotten Island expecting to laugh at Filipino jokes.
Perhaps that was unfair.
When DreamWorks first announced that it was making an animated movie inspired by Filipino folklore, I had the same mix of excitement and suspicion I tend to have whenever a big foreign production announces that it is going to do something Filipino. I was curious, of course, but there was also that small protective voice asking what kind of Filipino story we were going to get.
How Filipino would it actually be?
Would there be karaoke? Lechon? Someone pointing using their lips?
Would the movie keep stopping to explain things that Filipinos already understand?
Worse, would our culture become the joke?
I had apparently been thinking about these questions for much longer than I realized. The original headline announcing that DreamWorks was developing something around Filipino folklore is still somewhere in my phone gallery. I saved it when the project was first announced.
I suppose that says something about how badly I wanted the movie to be good.
So on September 26, my wife and I went to Scotiabank Theatre at West Edmonton Mall to finally watch it.
In 4DX.
This was probably a mistake.
It was fun, yes. During some of the bigger sequences, our seats seemed determined to become supporting characters. We were being shaken, pushed and thrown around while creatures were flying across the screen, and there were several moments when I wondered whether I was still watching the movie or somehow participating in it.
If I watch Forgotten Island again, I will probably choose a normal theatre.
Still, the ridiculousness of 4DX somehow suited the movie. Forgotten Island itself rarely sits still.
Neither did we.
Before the movie started, I looked around the auditorium. From where I was sitting, I guessed that perhaps 80 percent of the audience looked Filipino or Asian. It was not a full screening, which I noticed immediately but did not think too much about yet.
What I remember more was the atmosphere once the movie began.
People were laughing.
Not the quiet, polite kind where you hear three people chuckle somewhere behind you. There were moments when much of the room seemed to react together. Certain jokes clearly landed harder with people who recognized what they were seeing.
I expected that part.
What I did not expect was to become homesick within the first stretch of the movie.
It was not because of some dramatic scene about the Philippines.
There were no sweeping shots telling me how beautiful the country was supposed to be.
The movie simply showed Filipino life.
A busy neighbourhood. Houses. People. Food. Family. Noise. Things happening everywhere.
The kind of place that might look chaotic when viewed from the outside but makes complete sense when you grew up inside it.
There was lechon.
There was a picture of Jesus.
There was a salo-salo.
There was karaoke.
Someone pointed using their mouth.
There were even images of the Barrelman that made me laugh partly because it felt exactly like the kind of random thing you could somehow encounter in a Filipino house without ever receiving a satisfactory explanation for why it was there.
Some of these details were obvious. Others probably passed quickly enough that people unfamiliar with Filipino culture would not think much about them.
I noticed them.
And what surprised me was how little the movie seemed interested in congratulating itself for putting them there.
The Filipino neighbourhood was exaggerated, of course. This is animation. Yet it did not feel sensationalized. It did not seem as though the filmmakers were pointing at Filipino life and saying, look how quirky these people are.
The place simply existed.
That difference mattered to me.
For the first few minutes, I was mostly delighted.
Then the feeling changed.
I became homesick.
I have spent a fair amount of time convincing myself that I am not.
I live in Canada now. I have a life here. Work is here. Our plans are here. There are things about Edmonton that have become ordinary parts of my own life.
I know why we came.
I know what we are trying to build.
Perhaps it has been easier to tell myself that missing the Philippines is something I have mostly learned to manage.
Apparently not.
Because all it took was a DreamWorks cartoon showing an ordinary Filipino neighbourhood for that argument to collapse.
Dang.
I miss the Philippines.
And it was precisely the ordinariness that got me.
The crowdedness.
The noise.
People constantly being around other people.
Food appearing because people happen to be together.
A religious image sitting somewhere in the house without anyone needing to explain why.
Small gestures that make no sense if somebody describes them to you but make complete sense if you grew up seeing them.
That was what felt familiar.
I went into Forgotten Island expecting the movie to tell me something about Filipino mythology.
Within minutes, it had reminded me what Filipino life felt like.
Those are not the same thing.
And because it managed to do that without making the culture feel like an exhibit, I became much more willing to follow it wherever it wanted to go.
That turned out to be Nakali.
And Nakali was where the monsters of my childhood were waiting.
The Monsters I Grew Up Fearing
I grew up hearing about tiyanak, duwende, aswang and manananggal.
Not through some formal education in Philippine mythology.
They were simply part of growing up.
Someone would warn you about duwende.
Someone would mention a tiyanak.
Someone would tell you about an aswang that supposedly appeared somewhere, usually involving a story that had passed through enough relatives, neighbours and friends that nobody could possibly verify it anymore.
As a child, you do not ask for references.
You just become scared.
For me, the tiyanak and duwende were probably among the worst.
The tiyanak was especially disturbing. The idea of something appearing to be a baby while very much not being an ordinary baby was enough.
Then there was the manananggal.
A woman separates the upper half of her body from the lower half, grows wings and flies around at night.
Who came up with that?
And why did Filipino adults collectively decide this was information children needed to have?
Forgotten Island could have simply animated these creatures, inserted them into the plot and allowed Filipino nostalgia to do the rest.
I am glad it did not.
The movie borrows heavily from Filipino mythology, but it does not behave as if those myths are museum pieces that must never be touched. DreamWorks describes Nakali as a world filled with creatures Jo and Raissa grew up hearing about from their Filipino families, and the film takes considerable freedom with what those creatures become inside its own story.
That worked for me.
The creatures feel inspired by the stories rather than trapped inside them.
The tiyanak may be my favourite example.
I laughed so hard when it cut its own umbilical cord.
That is a sentence I never expected to write in a movie review.
Even with context, it remains ridiculous.
The tiyanak I imagined growing up was something frightening. Forgotten Island keeps enough of the disturbing concept to make it recognizable, then lets the creature become funny, strange and unexpectedly likeable.
And Manny Jacinto voices it.
I did not immediately recognize him, which made finding out later even funnier.
There is something wonderfully odd about taking a creature that frightened generations of Filipino children and turning it into one of the characters I wanted to spend more time with.
The manananggal worked differently.
I told my wife while we were watching that I think the manananggal has become less scary over time.
Perhaps familiarity did it.
We have seen versions of the creature in television, films, comedy, Halloween costumes and everything else Filipino media could throw at it. Eventually something that used to terrify you becomes so familiar that some of the fear disappears.
Forgotten Island somehow managed to make her frightening again.
Not exactly like the manananggal I had imagined growing up. The film changes the concept and builds its own story around her.
But the menace came back.
Then they gave the character to Lea Salonga.
Of course they did.
There is something almost too perfect about a Filipino legend playing a Filipino legend.
Salonga voices the feared Manananggal, while the wider cast includes H.E.R. as Jo, Liza Soberano as Raissa, Manny Jacinto, Dolly de Leon, Jo Koy, Dave Franco, Jenny Slate and Ronny Chieng.
Salonga has presence even when all you have is her voice. The character feels bigger because of it.
I would watch a spin-off.
Actually, I would watch several.
Nakali feels like a world that could hold far more stories. Philippine folklore certainly has enough material. Kapre. Tikbalang. Duwende. Different kinds of aswang. Different versions of the same creatures depending on where in the country you hear the story.
The movie reminded me that folklore survives partly because people keep changing it.
Stories are told differently depending on who is doing the telling. Regions develop their own versions. Families add details. Children misremember things and perhaps eventually tell those misremembered versions to somebody else.
Forgotten Island participates in that process.
It plays.
That makes the creatures feel alive.
It also helps that the actors do not sound as if they are carrying some heavy responsibility to represent Filipino culture correctly every second.
H.E.R. was phenomenal as Jo.
There was something in the personality of her voice that made the character immediately believable to me. Jo is fun, spontaneous and perhaps a little too comfortable believing that things will somehow remain okay.
That may be one reason I connected with her most.
Liza Soberano also surprised me.
I knew her from her work in the Philippines, so I expected some part of my previous image of her to follow me into the movie.
It did not.
I heard Raissa.
The voice acting felt detached from the roles I had associated with Soberano before, which is perhaps the best compliment I can give her here. I hope this leads to more interesting projects for her.
Dolly de Leon made me smile simply by being there. I loved the accent and the quips.
And Manny Jacinto as the tiyanak remains something I did not know I needed.
The cast helped make Forgotten Island feel strangely comfortable with its Filipinoness.
I did not spend the movie thinking, here comes another Filipino reference.
At some point I stopped checking.
I was simply watching.
When Representation Stops Feeling Like Representation
That may be the thing Forgotten Island does best.
At some point, I stopped thinking about representation.
Before watching it, representation was one of my main reasons for buying a ticket.
I wanted to see how a major Hollywood animation studio would handle Filipino culture. I wanted to support a project involving so many Filipinos and people of Filipino descent. I wanted the movie to succeed partly because I knew that projects like this do not appear very often.
Then the movie started and I stopped thinking about any of that.
The culture was already inside the story.
It did not need to keep announcing itself.
The names were there. The food was there. The homes were there. The gestures were there. The myths were there. The karaoke was definitely there.
Yet Jo and Raissa were allowed to have a problem that was not simply about being Filipino.
That was important.
Their friendship matters more than their ethnicity.
The possibility of forgetting each other matters more than whether the audience understands every Filipino joke.
Their memories matter more than whether somebody knows what lechon is.
That does not make the cultural identity weaker.
I think it makes it stronger.
There are stories about minority cultures that sometimes seem to spend so much effort explaining the culture that the characters barely get to exist outside it.
Forgotten Island did not feel that way to me.
It almost felt like a Filipino movie trying to be classic and general.
I mean that as praise.
It says, more or less: this is where these characters come from, these are the stories they know, this is what their world looks like.
Now let us tell you about two friends who are terrified of losing each other.
You do not need to be Filipino to understand that.
You only need to have loved someone.
You only need to have experienced a friendship changing.
You only need to have looked at someone who used to be part of your ordinary daily life and realized that you now know less about each other than you once did.
And this is where Forgotten Island became much more personal than I expected.
The central fantasy problem is that returning home may cost Jo and Raissa the memories of their friendship. That premise is built directly into DreamWorks’ own description of the film.
It sounds like a magical problem.
Then I sat with it.
People forget each other all the time.
Not always completely.
Not dramatically.
Usually much more slowly.
You move away.
Someone gets busy.
You stop speaking every day.
Then every week.
Then every month.
You still care about each other. You still remember old jokes. You still know this person mattered.
But the friendship slowly becomes something you remember instead of something you actively live inside.
That was painful to think about.
Especially because moving to Canada has made that process real for me.
There are friendships I left in the Philippines that still matter deeply.
Some remain close.
Others changed.
Of course they did.
I changed too.
Nobody stops living because you move away.
Your friends continue having lives without you, just as you begin constructing a life without them.
Someone gets married.
Someone changes jobs.
Someone has a child.
Someone joins another group of friends.
You see pieces of it online.
Sometimes you know what is happening.
Sometimes you suddenly realize you do not.
Then perhaps you meet again and discover that the friendship is still there, but both of you have accumulated stories in which the other person was absent.
There was no argument.
No betrayal.
No proper ending.
Life simply continued.
I do not think we talk enough about that part of immigration.
We talk about missing family.
We talk about Filipino food.
We talk about careers, money, weather, adjusting, homesickness and missed celebrations.
Friendship changes more quietly.
Perhaps that is why it sneaks up on you.
Forgotten Island uses literal memory loss as fantasy.
For me, sitting in Edmonton, it did not feel particularly fantastical.
Memory is already strange.
You can forget important details about a person and still remember exactly how it felt to be around them.
You can hear one song and suddenly recover an entire period of your life.
You can smell something and remember a room you have not entered for years.
You can watch an animated neighbourhood and suddenly feel homesick for a country you had been insisting you did not miss very much.
Memory does not behave properly.
The movie understands that.
My wife said something after the film that has stayed with me.
She felt Forgotten Island was not really only for children. The lesson changes depending on where you are in life when you see it.
A child may watch an adventure about two best friends.
A teenager might recognize the fear of eventually going separate ways from somebody important.
Someone older might think about friendships altered by careers, relationships, marriage and distance.
An immigrant might sit there thinking about people on the other side of the world.
Same movie.
Different wound.
That may be why I became emotional during the friendship scenes.
And yes, I did.
I had already been weakened by the Filipino neighbourhood.
By the time the movie started seriously asking what memories of another person are worth, I was finished.
A Movie That Rarely Lets You Breathe
I loved Forgotten Island.
That does not mean every part of it worked perfectly.
Most of my problems with it come from the same place.
It is trying to do so much, so quickly.
The film moves at a speed that can become exhausting.
Something happens, then another thing happens, then someone makes a joke, another creature appears, the plot moves again, there is an emotional beat, another action sequence begins, and in our particular case the 4DX chair then attempts to remove us from the building.
Sometimes I wanted the movie to stop.
Not because I was bored.
Because I wanted more time with what was already there.
Some characters and ideas felt as though they were introduced with the promise of something larger, only for the movie to move on.
Merman was probably the clearest example for me. There seemed to be more there, more personality and more history that I wanted the story to explore.
The ending gave me a similar feeling.
Kulang.
That Hiligaynon and Filipino feeling of something being a little short of what you hoped for.
Not bad.
Not broken.
Just not quite enough.
I liked the ending. I think it ends where it needs to end.
I also wanted another ten minutes.
Perhaps that is greed.
Maybe I simply did not want to leave Nakali yet.
The pacing also makes some emotional moments pass more quickly than I wanted. Jo and Raissa’s friendship could have used a few more quiet spaces. The ideas about memory could have used silence around them.
Even the monsters could have benefited.
Sometimes something becomes scarier when the movie stops moving long enough to let you look at it.
Still, the frantic energy is strangely difficult for me to criticize because I also enjoyed it.
Forgotten Island feels crowded.
Noisy.
Busy.
There are multiple things happening at once.
And I know I am probably projecting here, but that also felt familiar.
A Filipino gathering can involve one conversation happening beside another conversation while somebody is eating, another person is singing, somebody is calling you from somewhere, and someone else is insisting you take food home.
So perhaps the movie’s inability to sit still is a flaw.
Perhaps it is also why it feels alive.
Both can be true.
I wondered too whether the movie could have done slightly more to help viewers completely unfamiliar with Filipino culture enter some of its jokes and references.
This is a difficult balance because the last thing I wanted was a film that explained everything.
Please do not stop the story to explain pointing with your lips.
Just let the mouth point.
Some things are better when they exist without a presentation attached.
Still, there were moments when I wondered whether someone without any connection to the Philippines would know why something felt familiar or funny.
My own experience makes that difficult to judge.
I came into the theatre already carrying the context.
Yet judging by the laughter around us, the broader comedy seemed to work.
And that matters because I do not want to recommend Forgotten Island only to Filipinos.
I would recommend it to anyone.
Watch it because it is funny.
Watch it because the animation is wild.
Watch it because there is a tiyanak doing things the tiyanak of my childhood never did.
Watch it because Lea Salonga gets to be frightening.
Watch it because Jo and Raissa have a friendship worth caring about.
If you learn something about Filipino culture along the way, good.
I would rather that happen naturally than through a lecture.
That is also why I think Filipino parents in Canada should bring their children.
A Filipino child growing up here may recognize something that I never had the opportunity to see quite this way when I was growing up in Iloilo.
Not Filipino culture being shown as a special topic.
Just Filipino culture existing inside a major DreamWorks movie.
The child can recognize the food, gestures, names or stories and then continue enjoying the adventure.
Maybe that is the representation I care about most.
Not being told that our culture is important.
Being shown that it can simply belong.
Then I Looked at the Empty Seats
This brings me back to the auditorium.
It was not full.
That bothered me when we arrived.
It bothered me much more after I knew how good the movie was.
I need to be careful here because one 4DX screening in West Edmonton Mall cannot tell us how a movie is doing.
Now, though, we have the first weekend numbers.
Forgotten Island opened with about US$12.8 million domestically from 3,548 theatres. Its first reported worldwide total was about US$20.65 million, with US$7.85 million coming from international markets. Variety described the domestic result as softer than expected and reported an estimated production cost of US$80 million, while also pointing out that the film had not yet opened in several major international markets.
So no, I am not ready to write its obituary.
It had been in North American theatres for one weekend when I wrote this.
There are still markets to open. There are later weekends. There will eventually be whatever life the movie finds outside cinemas.
Still, the opening makes me nervous.
The Philippines offers a happier detail. The movie opened there with about US$1.53 million according to Box Office Mojo’s first reported figures.
Of course that made me happy.
But I wish more people everywhere were seeing it.
Not because anybody owes Forgotten Island a ticket.
I do not like that argument.
Filipinos should not have to buy tickets because Filipino artists worked on a movie.
Representation is not a debt.
A Filipino story can still be bad.
A movie can be culturally important and boring.
You should not have to lower your standards because people who look like you finally appeared on screen.
The frustrating thing about Forgotten Island is that I do not think you need to lower anything.
It is good.
That is why I want people to see it.
I do not want anyone to “support” Forgotten Island as though they are donating to a cause.
Support makes it sound like charity.
Buy a ticket because there is a good movie playing.
A flawed movie, yes.
One that sometimes moves too quickly.
One that leaves a few characters underexplored.
One whose ending made me want just a little more.
But also a movie that made me and my wife laugh throughout the night.
A movie that made Philippine monsters feel fresh.
A movie that allowed Filipino life to exist without treating it as the punchline.
A movie about memory that managed to make an immigrant sitting in Edmonton remember things he had been trying not to admit he missed.
That movie earned my affection.
And yes, part of my anxiety about the box office is selfish.
I want more.
I want to return to Nakali.
I want more of Lea Salonga’s Manananggal.
I want another tiyanak.
I want another Filipino myth that Hollywood audiences may have never heard before.
I want filmmakers to be able to look at cultures sometimes dismissed as too specific, too unfamiliar or too risky and realize that specificity does not prevent a story from being universal.
Forgotten Island proves that point for me.
The Filipino neighbourhood does not make Jo and Raissa’s friendship inaccessible.
The salo-salo does not prevent somebody from another culture from understanding what it means to gather around food.
The tiyanak does not need to become a generic Western fantasy creature before another audience can enjoy it.
We do not need to remove the things that make us specific before another person can recognize something human in us.
That is probably what I found most satisfying about the movie.
Its main story is not actually about being Filipino.
It is about friendship.
Memory.
Growing apart.
Holding onto the people who matter.
The Filipinoness gives the story a home.
It does not imprison it there.
What I Took Home With Me
When my wife and I walked out of Scotiabank Theatre, I already knew I loved Forgotten Island.
I told her it was great.
What I did not immediately understand was why it had hit me quite as hard as it did.
I went in expecting folklore.
I came out thinking about memory.
I went in wondering whether DreamWorks could make something feel genuinely Filipino.
I came out thinking about friends I no longer see as often.
I went in hoping our culture would not become a joke.
I came out realizing that a cartoon had made me admit how much I missed home.
The mythology was fun.
The animation worked.
The jokes worked.
The Filipino details made me proud.
But the thing that followed me home was quieter.
Places keep existing when you leave them.
People do too.
You build a new life somewhere and the old life does not freeze while waiting for you to return.
That is obvious when written down.
It feels different when you live it.
There is a version of immigration that sounds almost clean when we tell it afterward.
We left.
We adjusted.
We built a life.
We found work.
We learned a new city.
We moved forward.
All of those things can be true.
But moving forward does not mean nothing was left behind.
Sometimes what you left comes back through a phone call.
Sometimes through a photograph.
Sometimes through food.
Sometimes through a friend you have not spoken to for months suddenly sending you something stupid that immediately puts you back into an old conversation.
And apparently, sometimes through an animated Filipino neighbourhood inside a DreamWorks movie.
That first part of Forgotten Island was still what I kept thinking about afterward.
The neighbourhood.
The food.
The people.
The picture of Jesus.
The mouth pointing.
The salo-salo.
The karaoke.
Things I once considered too ordinary to be worth missing.
Maybe that is what memory does.
It waits until the ordinary becomes unavailable.
Then suddenly you understand what it was worth.
I also thought about my friends.
People who used to be close enough that seeing them required almost no planning.
People whose presence was so ordinary that I never thought there might come a time when meeting them would require a plane ticket, vacation leave and conversations about schedules.
Nobody announces the last normal afternoon.
Nobody tells you, remember this dinner because one day you will miss it.
You just live.
Then eventually you look back.
Forgotten Island made me look back.
That was probably the last thing I expected from a movie containing a talking tiyanak.
And maybe she was right.
Perhaps the lesson you take from this movie depends entirely on when it finds you.
If I had watched it years ago in the Philippines, perhaps I would have mostly enjoyed the monsters.
I might have laughed at the jokes and appreciated seeing Filipino culture in a DreamWorks film.
But I watched it now.
I watched it after leaving.
That changed everything.
The title itself began to feel different.
Forgotten Island.
Something lost.
Something left somewhere.
Something you might still remember if you try hard enough.
For those two hours in Edmonton, the Philippines did not feel forgotten to me.
It felt oddly close.
Not perfectly represented.
Not completely captured.
No movie could do that.
But close enough.
Enough to make me laugh.
Enough to make me proud.
Enough to make me miss people.
Enough to remind me that homesickness can sit quietly for months and then appear because an animated character pointed using their lips.
Forgotten Island made me feel proud, nostalgic, and hungry for friends and good memories.
Maybe that is why those empty seats bothered me.
I hope more people find the movie while it is still in theatres.
Not to save Filipino representation.
Not out of obligation.
Just because I think there is something here worth seeing.
Something funny.
Something strange.
Something specific.
Something unexpectedly human.
The movie is called Forgotten Island.
But sitting there thousands of kilometres from home, it remembered us.
References
DreamWorks Animation. (2026). Forgotten Island: Official movie page. Cast, crew and official synopsis. DreamWorks — Forgotten Island
Box Office Mojo. (2026). Forgotten Island — worldwide box-office rollout. Figures accessed September 28, 2026. Box Office Mojo — Forgotten Island
Rubin, R. (2026, September 28). Global box-office reporting on Forgotten Island and other weekend releases. Variety. Variety box-office report
Reuters. (2026, September 22). “Filipino folklore takes center stage in DreamWorks’ Forgotten Island film.” Reuters feature on Forgotten Island
