DreamWorks has released Forgotten Island, a new animated feature about best friends forever, and our review finds it frantically, even stroboscopically over-energised — an example of what the critic calls exhausting "AI-type content production" in animation.

The charge is blunt. You could make the same argument against plenty of live-action films, the review concedes, but it is in animation that this kind of "soulless blitzkrieg" tends to predominate. Forgotten Island stands as the latest case.

The film is over-controlled and over-determined. It never, or hardly ever, takes its pedal from the metal. It never takes a breath or a moment to let its characters come to life. At times it appears to be aping the world of Japanese anime, but without anime's sense of character or its capacity for calm.

The story, weirdly reminiscent of The Hangover of all things, is set in the Philippines in the pre-social media 1990s. Jo, voiced by R&B star HER, is a lonely and super-imaginative teenager always in trouble at school. Like Moana, she has a wise grandmother who guides her toward her ancestral destiny and who has captivated Jo with stories of her culture and identity — stories of the forgotten island of Nakali.

Jo makes friends with the similarly lonely Raissa, voiced by Liza Soberano. Raissa is smart like Jo, but with a much more focused sense of academic discipline.

That is as far as the review takes us before pointing readers to the full text, but the verdict on the opening stretch is already clear. This is a film that mistakes velocity for vitality, packing every frame with movement while leaving its characters inert.

The critique lands at a moment when animation studios face intensifying questions about volume and craft. Bradshaw's framing — "AI-type content production" — puts Forgotten Island in the same conversation as the industry's broader anxiety about machine-generated and machine-like output, even for a hand-styled studio feature.

For DreamWorks, the film represents a bet on a nostalgic, culture-rooted adventure with a music-star lead in HER and a Filipino setting rarely seen in big-budget Western animation. Whether audiences agree with the critic's harsh assessment — or find in Nakali the warmth the review says the film fails to deliver — will determine how Forgotten Island is remembered.