The Red Turtle was Studio Ghibli’s first co-production with a foreign animation company.
The film was made with the French studio Wild Bunch and directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit. It follows a shipwrecked man on an uninhabited tropical island and uses almost no spoken dialogue, relying on visual storytelling and music.
The Red Turtle premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and was released in Japan later that year. It is a Studio Ghibli-associated production, but unlike most Ghibli features it was directed by a filmmaker from outside Japan and created through an international European-Japanese collaboration. That distinction makes it different from films that merely received overseas distribution or English-language dubbing.