The hero of DreamWorks Animation’s latest, the muddled Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, is a 16-year-old girl like any other. That is, of course, if you don’t count the fact she’s bright blue. Or that she has tiny gills where her ears should be. Her family’s from Canada, you see – or, at least, that’s the excuse every one of the Gillmans’s friends, neighbours, and colleagues seems comfortable with. Voiced by To All the Boys’s instantly likeable breakout Lana Condor, Ruby is a clumsy mathlete desperate to blend in.
Her mother, Agatha (Toni Collette), has always warned her to stay away from the ocean (despite them actively choosing to live in a seaside town). Soon, she finds out why: if she dips even a single toe into the Atlantic Ocean, she’ll turn into a Kraken the size of a drive-thru McDonald’s. That only the Gillman women can transform into gigantic Krakens means there are obvious parallels to Pixar's Turning Red. Both films are energetic journeys through female adolescence, stuffed with metaphors for puberty, only Turning Red, with its deployment of a giant red panda, does it more elegantly.
