Tomorrow, Hollywood gets something it rarely offers: an original animated adventure with no sequel number, no pre-sold toy line, and no superhero cape in sight. Forgotten Island, the feature directorial debut of Januel Mercado, arrives in theaters September 16 with a staggering 9/10 rating on TMDb already behind it, and a premise that sounds less like a studio pitch than a dare. Two best friends. One magical island. And a return ticket home that costs them every memory they've ever made together.
At its center are Jo and Raissa, high school graduates celebrating their final night together before adult life pulls them in different directions. That farewell evening takes a sharp turn when the pair stumble through a mysterious portal and land on Nakali, a fantastical island that looks like the kind of place where every leaf might be watching you. Nakali, however, is not a vacation. The island's bargain is brutal in its simplicity: they can go home, but the memories of their entire friendship - every inside joke, every late-night phone call, every fight and reconciliation - will be the price. What follows is a race against forgetting, as Jo and Raissa try to find a way off Nakali before they lose not just each other, but the knowledge that they ever mattered to each other at all.
Mercado, best known for his work on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, brings an animator's eye for kinetic movement and an unexpected emotional seriousness to material that could easily have coasted on whimsy. The setup is gentle: two kids, one last night, a friendship about to be tested by distance. Then the film quietly raises the stakes until a farewell between friends feels as urgent as any ticking clock in a thriller.
The voice cast is a genuine event. H.E.R. voices Jo, and Liza Soberano voices Raissa - two performers whose musicality and warmth give the central bond an intimacy that carries the film's heavier turns. Around them, the island fills out with a murderer's row of comic and character talent. Dave Franco plays Raww, Manny Jacinto is Bungi, Jenny Slate voices Batiba, and Jo Koy brings Datu to life. Lea Salonga voices Manang, while Dolly de Leon lends Lola Fatima the kind of gravity that makes even a small role feel load-bearing. It's a cast assembled with obvious care, and the ensemble's chemistry does much of the work of making Nakali feel inhabited rather than merely rendered.
Tonally, Forgotten Island refuses to pick a lane, and that's its strength. It is billed as animation, adventure, fantasy, comedy, and family - five genres that often clash when a film tries to serve them all. Here, the comedy keeps the fantasy from becoming self-important, while the adventure keeps the comedy from drifting into sketch territory. The fantasy, crucially, is not decoration. The island's memory-tax premise gives every action sequence a psychological charge. When the characters run, they're not just outrunning danger; they're outrunning erasure. That's a rare thing in a family film: stakes you can feel in your chest rather than merely understand in your head.
At 109 minutes, the film moves with confidence but never seems rushed. Mercado trusts his audience - kids included - to sit with quieter moments between the set pieces. That patience pays off in the final act, when the question of what Jo and Raissa are willing to sacrifice lands with far more force than a louder movie would have managed. The film's message about friendship is delivered without a lecture; it simply lets the characters face the possibility of losing what they have, and lets the audience do the math.
Then there's the release strategy. An original, English-language Hollywood animated feature opening in mid-September with no franchise scaffolding is a genuine anomaly in 2026. The industry has spent years consolidating around known quantities, and Forgotten Island is a bet that audiences still want something they haven't seen before. The 9/10 TMDb rating suggests early viewers think that bet is paying off.
In a season crowded with familiar names, Forgotten Island offers something harder to find: surprise. It's a film about memory that understands memory is made of small, specific things - a shared look, a dumb joke, a last night that felt like it might be the end of everything. Whether it becomes a classic or just a lovely one-off, it's the rare animated release that trusts its audience to remember what it felt like to be sixteen and terrified of losing a friend. That's not a small thing to pull off. It might be the whole point.
