Frantic: "Forgotten Island"

Competition for the latest round of Best Animated Feature gongs is in the process of ratcheting up. Netflix launched its Brad Bird-directed Ray Gunn at last week's London Film Festival; Laika's stopmotion Wildwood lands in cinemas this Friday. In the meantime, we shall have to make do with Forgotten Island, DreamWorks' zappy effort to split the difference between Disney's Moana, their own Trolls franchise and last year's all-conquering Netflix behemoth K-Pop Demon Hunters. From the former, directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado take a sherbet colour palette and an honourable yen for greater Pacific island representation: our heroines are schoolgirls in the Philippines of the 1990s - brainiac Raissa (Liza Soberano) and rowdy wildcard (H.E.R.) - whose friendship is founded on a keen sense of adventure. From the latter two, the film takes anime-style cutaways, a hyperonline mode of audience address and a belief in the power of pop music to either change the world or simply capture an emotion - although as the featured songs are Eighties standards by the likes of Journey, Simple Minds and INXS (and as the leads' Ryan Tedder-penned closing-credits duet "BRB" appears to owe some uncredited musical debt to When in Rome's 1987 artefact "The Promise") the primary emotion viewers outside the target demographic will feel being captured is a deep sigh of Christ, I'm old weariness.

Unacknowledged amid the movie's frantic digimated splicing-and-dicing: any real recognition that last year was such an undistinguished year for feature animation that a well-marketed ever-present like Demon Hunters - unavoidable on TV, the radio, the merch shelves or the Internet - was always likely to scoop everything. Forgotten Island, for its part, suggests the limitations of the lol, random storytelling style that has become a feature of so much 21st century family fare. While it's undeniably a progression that the animated feature has moved past Disney's picture-perfect princesses, having a pair of distractible dorks gabble through key scenes of exposition lessens the dramatic stakes and leaves us less than clear as to what's going on. As Jo and Raissa tumble through one such unexplained portal and into the fantasyland of the title - lol, random - the manic gabbiness brings us to some funny lines and cute bits of business: I liked the angry marshmallow warriors, resembling the Terracotta Army as remodelled by Pillsbury. Yet it also seems to speak, at roughly twelve to the dozen, to an underlying creative insecurity: we're being dragged by the seat of our pants through a culture rather than being allowed - as the original Moana allowed us - to sit with and marvel at it. Even as these events unfolded, I would have struggled to tell you the specific cultural significance of the giant parrot, the three-eyed baby, the cat memory demon, the talking dog with the infected chest tattoo or his cerulean gymbuddy with a trident: they're just the colourful filler characters we've all too regularly encountered inside the multiplex. It's a case of mixed blessings, then. Unlike a lot of commercially minded animation, Forgotten Island does have a personality, but it's the overbearing (and extremely loud) kind you tend to back away from at parties; and it does have moments of visual artistry, but - as with the surreal dream house finale - these are freefloating, unmoored from what's around them, and they register for a split-second before Crawford and Mercado scrabble onto the next setpiece. Belatedly, their film arrives at a crystallising image for itself, in the form of a thousand Post-It notes blowing in the wind; it feels like a production that's had to be hastened into cinemas before the animated bar gets decisively raised for another year.

Forgotten Island is now showing in cinemas nationwide.