Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ on Netflix, an Animated Adventure That’s Generic In Spite of That Title

This week on Movie Titles That Are Better Than the Movies Themselves Theatre is Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), which nips at the heels of 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies in the marquee-sure-grabs-your-attention sweepstakes. Dreamworks Animation sandwiched RGTK between last year’s masterful Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (yes, masterful) and, god help us, the upcoming third Trolls movie (yes, god help us), and released it theatrically up against heavy hitters in Pixar’s Elemental and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – both signs of meager confidence in a story about the travails of a 16-year-old sea creature who’s passing herself off as Canadian in order to fit in with humans (good joke, eh!). And so it flopped, but I can see it getting a little traction at home – maybe after it gets past that $20 rental window, that is.

RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: High school sucks. It’s been established in every other movie that’s been released since A Trip to the Moon. It especially sucks if you’re a lone kraken in the whole of the student body, and that’s where Ruby Gillman’s (Lana Condor) story begins. I think everyone assumes she’s just a blue-skinned human with rubbery-looking dreads, because that’s how Canadians in this reality look? I dunno. The movie doesn’t get into the potential issues with that, so we have no choice but to move on. Ruby’s a smart kid – she’s a mathlete! – with a few besties who don’t quite fit in. She’d like to go to prom with her crush, Connor (Jaboukie Young-White), but her mother, Agatha (Toni Collette), says no. Mom has lots of rules like that, the main one being that Ruby absolutely cannot ever, ever go in the ocean, but she doesn’t say why, because if she did, then the movie wouldn’t have enough plot to fill feature length. 

I’m hung up on Agatha’s lousy parenting. One, if you tell someone not to do something and don’t explain why, doesn’t it make them want to do it more? (Something smells fishy here, rimshot!) And two, if Agatha wanted to avoid the ocean issue entirely, why are they living in a seaside locale and not someplace that’s landlocked? That would greatly reduce the possibility of Ruby diving into the water to save Connor after he falls in, and then learning that being in the ocean causes her to transform into a gigantic sea monster with massive tentacles and bioluminescent suckers – but then again without the ocean views, Agatha’s status as a real estate superstar would suffer. Thankfully, Ruby eventually shrinks back to normal size – phew – with her clothes miraculously intact, assuring us that the laws of this universe are at least similar to the metaphysics of the Hulk’s pants.

The subsequent fallout between Ruby and her mother is understandable. Note to Agatha: You may have told your daughter that you, too, can grow to gargantuan kraken size, but it’s too late, and even though you’re kinda blowing it, there’s still time to address your gigantic screw-ups. But first, Ruby’s inspired to R-U-N-N-O-F-T to the ocean depths and meet her estranged grandmother for the first time: Grandmamah (Jane Fonda) is a queen down there, and a warrior, to boot, and there’s all kinds of stuff for Ruby to learn about her heritage and the Mariana Trench-sized divide between her mother and grandmother. Meanwhile, a stupidass B-story involving crazy old seaman Captain Gordon Lighthouse’s (Will Forte) desire to hunt the kraken inevitably farts around long enough, filling time until it dovetails with Ruby’s quadruple-XL coming of age, which sure as heck seems destined to rock the prom.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The premise is Turning Red, the setting is Ponyo, the seaside vibe is Luca, the mythic-creature story is Abominable, the magic-trident action is Aquaman, the mean-girl rival is The Little Mermaid (1989), and the bioluminescent kaiju battles are Pacific Rim.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Fonda as the kraken matriarch is perfect casting – at least on a meta-level, considering the multigenerational female talent here, in Collette and Condor. 

Memorable Dialogue: Grandmamah gets catty about the krakens’ rivals: “Mermaids are selfish, vain narcissists with mediocre hair!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is one fnfth away from being Sea Monkeys: The Movie, and it’s about as consequential. At least it’s not another story about a talking dog, I guess? And nobody stops the movie in its tracks to sing? Although it does kowtow to the Dreamworks Animation mandate of featuring 1-1.5 generic pop songs per 15 minutes of run time, as well as other formulaic conventions of modern family-friendly animated films and high-school coming-of-age sagas: witty one-liners and high-concept premise from the former, child-parent discord and the big prom finale from the latter. Director Kirk DiMicco (The Croods, uh, Space Chimps) and a handful of writers farm plenty of other cliches, too, piecing them together to form a movie that’s as watchable as it is forgettable.

I don’t intend to nuke the movie with faint praise. Its charms are modest, and its annoyances minimal. I laughed a few times, although I wouldn’t say it was necessarily kraken me up. (Apologies!) The animation has some thoughtful character and set design and a nifty plasticine look to it that makes it look like an artistic choice rather than budgetary handcuffs (note: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish reportedly spent $20-40 million more than Kraken, and you can tell). The plot reaches a fork in the road, and it takes the route more traveled, where the other would have been more compelling and less conventionally spectacular. But the expectation is that the movie will end with hugs, violence and the big dance, and no one involved seems too interested in upending expectations. It’s a nice movie, but it inspires no greater superlatives than that.

Our Call: Hold your seahorses until Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken hits a streaming service (likely Peacock), then STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.