Ruby Gillman Could Have Been Great!

I think Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken is my favourite movie of 2023 to talk about. Truly, it is such an interesting thing, no piece of cinema released in 2023 has taken up more of my mental process. It is not anything like Nimona, Across the Spider-Verse, or even Elemental, and I don't mean that is terms of quality, story, cinematography or critical and commercial reception, no I mean that in the sense that, Ruby Gillman was such a disappointing mess that at least half of my thoughts about this movie concern whether or not I even like it.

The problem with Ruby Gillman is not new to cinema, we have seen movies filled with missed opportunities before, but watching it makes me feel like the filmmakers actively tried to avoid the interesting parts of the story. I've talked about this quite a lot already, I've done three separate blogs about Ruby Gillman, first was the First Impressions blog, then one where I compared it to Elemental to try to analyze why one movie was a sleeper hit and the other was slept on, and most recently I ranked it as the fourth worst animated movie of 2023. However, it just sits there, in the back of my mind, gnawing at my brain, the simple fact that this movie is truly one of animations greatest "Could have been" stories, I'd argue up there with The Thief and the Cobbler and The Modifyers, Ruby Gillman is a "could have been" that... somehow "is", and if that doesn't make sense, you're not alone, I just wrote it and I don't quite understand it.

The most important questions of "Could have been" stories are "What" and "Why", specifically "What could it have been?" and "Why was it not?", and what makes Ruby Gillman such an interesting "Could Have Been" is the idea that nobody sets out to make a bad movie, so when I say "Ruby Gillman could have been great", it actually kind of hurts to have to ask "Why was it not?". It feels obvious to me what the movie should have been, and it seems obvious to others, but why wasn't it obvious to the filmmakers?

I think a good question to ask in this case is "How could Ruby Gillman have been great?" and the answer is pretty simple; it has the right pieces. A fish out of water story where the main character is... pretty much literally a fish out of water, and seeing them have to balance their identity with having to adapt into a new society that is foreign to them, that is a really good story idea, and it has been used to great effect in many ways. This story immediately is identifiable, relatable, and poignant. So many people, thanks to their ethnical background, their gender identity, their disabilities, or even just because they struggle with identity completely, can relate with a character like Ruby Gillman, someone who is caught between two identities. It helps a lot that Ruby's friends and family are interesting enough to really add layers to this concept. How does being in a relationship with a human affect her relationship with her family, how does her family affect her relationship with her friends, how would the reveal that she's a Kraken affect her relationship with her friends, how does it effect the relationship she and her family have in her town?

I guess in some ways one could argue that they had scraps of this idea in the movie, with how wanting to embrace the fact she's a princess affects her relationship with her mother, but that does not really feature heavily in the movie. Honestly, even the Princess stuff could have been good, because it could have added an entirely new layer of drama, she not only has to balance her human life and her Kraken life, but she also has to do it while struggling with her own identity, this is a really fantastic plot for a movie. Short and sweet, Ruby Gillman should have been a movie about a teenaged girl struggling with her identity, we did not need mermaids, we did not need a war, and although a giant kaiju battle is welcomed, it was not wholly necessary.

When I talked about this movie on my worst of 2023 list, I brought up that, this movie seems to have an identity struggle of its own, not knowing what kind of movie it wants to be. I've heard the meme about Elemental being written by an A.I. trying to remake Zootopia, which is, first off not at all true Elemental and Zootopia are two different stories, and second of all, really unfair on the face of it, because Elemental knew what story it was telling. Ruby Gillman seemed to want to be Turning Red, except with hints of The Princess Diaries, and maybe a bit of Luca. Well those are three completely different stories, it's like making music and wanting to mix Madness, System of a Down, and Bruce Cockburn, like you really need to find the pieces of these elements that fit, and it really did not feel like Ruby Gillman had those fitting pieces. It had the right pieces, not the right connectors.

A Tumblr user by name of mauraders4evr made an interesting post about the biggest problem with Ruby Gillman, you can read it all here, but to paraphrase, the movie's concept is missing the "And Then", the part that adds to the subversion and makes viewers invested in it. Personally, I agree with this sentiment, but I want to add that it did feel like Ruby Gillman knew it was subversive, but not what it was subverting. The movie has little more subversion than "Mermaids are evil actually".
"It's The Little Mermaid, because the villain looks like Ariel!"
Okay, is that it? I'm sorry but uhh... Disney did this kind of subversion better... back in 1991... by making the hunky and heroic looking Gaston, a character who looks like they'd be the typical Disney hero, a villain. Subversion is about more than playing with our expectations, it's about taking concepts and tropes and flipping them around.

I don't think this movie needed to be subversion, I think it needed to be more grounded. My comparison to Elemental wasn't just to look at why Ruby Gillman bombed when Elemental became a surprise hit, I did the comparison because Ruby Gillman, could have easily been the movie Elemental wanted to be, a movie about identity, relationships outside of your own kin, and what those relationships truly mean. Ruby Gillman could have been the great movie that was hiding in Elemental's weaknesses. The greatest tragedy with Ruby Gillman, with any piece of entertainment really, is not that it's bad, it's that it could have been so much more.

Also, while it's on my mind, why did they have the joke about them hiding their identity by saying they were Canadian? Was it because of Turning Red?