Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023)

DreamWorks Animation has spent two decades perfecting the art of the misfit adolescent who discovers an inconvenient destiny, and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken arrives as a serviceable entry in that catalog. A shy sixteen-year-old kraken passes for human in a coastal town, breaks her mother's rule about the ocean, and promptly transforms into a giant cephalopod. The film premiered at Annecy, opened against stiffer competition, and finished its theatrical run well short of its budget. These are the facts. The film carries them with a quiet dignity, like a guest who arrived at the wrong party and decided to stay anyway.

The cast is genuinely varied, with Lana Condor, Colman Domingo, Sam Richardson, Jaboukie Young-White, Liza Koshy, and Ramona Young filling out the ensemble, though the screenplay never asks the actors to do anything with that variety beyond existing. The narrative framework leans matriarchal: a warrior queen grandmother voiced by Jane Fonda, a lineage of female kraken rulers, a mother-daughter conflict that drives the third act, and a female villain in Annie Murphy's mermaid queen. This is structural inheritance from the teen-comedy playbook more than argument. Nobody delivers a thesis. The film simply prefers its women complicated and its power matrilineal, which is a choice, and a mild one.

What the film declines to do is instructive. There is no racial reckoning, no climate sermon, no indictment of the real estate economy despite Agatha's profession, no meditation on body image, and no romance outside the heterosexual prom-night default. Ruby suffers a panic attack in a library, and the film treats it as a plot mechanism, not a diagnosis. The messages about identity and family are delivered softly enough that a viewer could miss them while checking a phone. It is a pleasant, underperforming confection with progressive furniture and no inclination to lecture. We have graded harsher films that deserved it less.