Forgotten Island First Reactions: DreamWorks Just Weaponized Nostalgia, Filipino Folklore, and a Wereboy Named Raww

Welcome to the Forgotten Island First Reactions cycle, a whirlwind that started at CinemaCon in April, detoured through a five-minute standing ovation in Annecy, and has now landed — festival badge still swinging from its lanyard — in front of actual critics ahead of its September 25 release.

Every few years, a DreamWorks movie shows up wearing a trench coat that says “definitely not another buddy comedy” on it, and then it turns out to be exactly that — except this time the buddy comedy is animated, set in the ’90s Philippines, and apparently structured like The Hangover if the Wolfpack had grown up watching Coco.

And the consensus, so far, is loud, a little chaotic, and mostly delighted.

The First “Forgotten Island First Reactions” Wave: CinemaCon Loses Its Mind

Long before a single formal review dropped, the Forgotten Island first reactions were already flooding timelines out of CinemaCon in April 2026, where Universal and DreamWorks gave attendees a “world exclusive” early look.

According to The HoloFiles’ round-up of the screening, the comparisons to a certain R-rated Vegas bachelor-party trilogy started almost immediately, with one outlet declaring the film “THE HANGOVER for families” hashtag CinemaCon and all.

Silverspot Cinemas chimed in with the kind of unfiltered enthusiasm usually reserved for open bars, saying they laughed, cried, and felt deeply connected to the characters.

That’s a strong opening bid for a movie about a wereboy, a memory-eating tree spirit, and a truffle-obsessed king seeking revenge for a bar fight nobody can remember. Which, yes, is the actual plot.

Then Annecy Happened, and the Standing Ovation Clock Started Ticking

If CinemaCon was the hype trailer, Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June was the main event — a five-minute standing ovation for a work-in-progress cut, which is the animation-festival equivalent of a mic drop that never actually lands because everyone’s too busy clapping.

By the time actual finished-film reviews started rolling in this September, the Forgotten Island first reactions had already built a runway of goodwill that critics either had to justify or puncture. Spoiler: mostly justify.

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What the Actual Critics Are Saying (Spoiler: They Brought Snacks and Feelings)

Here’s where it gets fun, because nearly every review reads like it was written by someone who walked in expecting a nice little culture-forward cartoon and walked out needing a lie-down.

Screen Rant basically declared the film a card-carrying member of the new wave of “too much, and I mean that as a compliment” animation, putting it in the same breathless company as Across the Spider-Verse — noting the movie packs jokes into a single frame and fires them at the viewer in rapid succession.

Their Metacritic-listed take goes even further, admitting the film rivals Across the Spider-Verse for sheer busyness and calling it invigorating rather than overwhelming, provided you’re willing to vibe with a buddy comedy fueled by the same energy drinks its heroes are chugging.

But Why Tho loved the cultural specificity — a Filipino-set story about lifelong best friends Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) — while gently noting that the film occasionally borrows its structural DNA from other stories, landing somewhere between Dude, Where’s My Car? and Inside Out tonally, even if it earns a pass for how it reworks those shared themes.

Explosion Network, reviewing out of MIFF, went so far as to call it one of DreamWorks’ best, leaning fully into the amnesiac bar-crawl structure: the girls wake up on a mystical island having already lost a full day of memories, and have to reconstruct what happened — tattoos and all — which is, again, extremely Hangover-coded for a PG movie about grandma’s folklore.

Spotlight Report zeroed in on the film’s hyperactive lead, describing Jo as essentially running on a permanent supply of energy drinks, bouncing through an anime-inflected, constantly-shifting visual style that borrows from the Mutant Mayhem/KPop Demon Hunters school of “let’s just try seventeen art styles and see what sticks.”

TL;DR Movie Reviews admired how deliberately the film pitches itself at a specific audience and still manages to win over outsiders to that audience, single out the villain — a shapeshifting Manananggal — for its stilted, halting movement style, and even throws in a compliment about the film containing, and we quote loosely, one of the best Jesus jokes they’ve seen in a kids’ movie. No further context provided. We’re not going to ask.

Meanwhile, the aggregate scores are doing exactly what aggregate scores do when a movie is clearly a crowd-pleaser: Rotten Tomatoes critic pull-quotes are stacked with 4.5-out-of-5s and 9-out-of-10s, one reviewer calling it flatly a lesson in film excellence audiences aren’t likely to forget (a pun so on-the-nose it should get its own producer credit), while Metacritic currently shows the film sitting at 100% positive across its early batch of reviews — which, four reviews in, is either a rock-solid signal or the calm before somebody’s inevitable “actually, let’s talk about the pacing” hot take. We’ll see.

And the Audiences? Also Losing It, Just More Feral About It

If critics are being measured and thoughtful, Letterboxd users are doing what Letterboxd users do best: yelling in metaphors. One user described the film as though DreamWorks put The Hangover and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into a blender with the visual style of Spider-Verse and KPop Demon Hunters, and somehow it worked.

A Spanish-language reviewer basically said the same thing with more enthusiasm about the licuadora (blender) metaphor. Someone else proposed that the film’s central chant — a riff on “Who Let the Dogs Out?” — should be adopted by actual medical professionals as a panic-attack breathing technique.

This is not a joke we’re making up; it’s an actual sentence from an actual Letterboxd review, and frankly it might be the single funniest sentence to emerge from the entire Forgotten Island first reactions news cycle.

The Theories, the Rumors, and the Slightly Suspicious Timing

A few threads worth tugging on if you’re the type who reads reviews like tea leaves:

• The “quiet awards push” theory. Multiple critics are explicitly using words like “recognition” and “awards it deserves.” Combine that with an early Annecy premiere and a six-months-early CinemaCon reveal, and this smells like a studio quietly building a Best Animated Feature case months before the film even opens wide.
• The “Hangover for kids” branding wasn’t an accident. It shows up from CinemaCon reactions in April all the way through September reviews. That’s not critics converging by coincidence — that’s a marketing hook that got planted early and grew like folklore itself.
• The culture story is doing real work. Nearly every single review — Gulf News included, reporting on diaspora excitement around the trailer — leads with the fact that this is DreamWorks’ first major swing at Filipino mythology and 1990s Philippine setting, following the Coco/Moana/KPop Demon Hunters playbook of “vibrant culture plus universal friendship story equals box office gold.”

So… Should You Believe the Hype?

Based on the sheer volume and consistency of the Forgotten Island First Reactions — from CinemaCon whoops to Annecy standing ovations to a critics’ consensus that’s currently sitting somewhere between “genuinely great” and “somebody pass me a towel, I’m crying at a cartoon about a Manananggal” — this is shaping up to be one of DreamWorks’ better-reviewed outings in years.

The chief complaints so far are minor: some structural familiarity, a villain that might spook the youngest kids, and a visual style so busy it borders on sensory overload for anyone not raised on energy drinks and internet-brain pacing.

But nobody, and we mean nobody, is coming out of this movie unmoved. Or un-tattooed, apparently. We still don’t have full details on that.

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