If a friendship is built on shared memories, what is left of it when a demon steals them in Forgotten Island? DreamWorks’ animated adventure, steeped in Filipino mythology, was written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, with a score by Nathan Matthew David. We follow the question through what makes a friend a friend, from the weight one friend can carry to the love we wrap in a lie, and through why God tells us to remember and what he chooses not to hold against us. We also ask whether “it’s just their nature” ever clears anyone of responsibility. First, our initial impressions of the movie.
Initial Impressions of Forgotten Island
Eve went into Forgotten Island without knowing what to expect and came out moved. Her father was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and when Raissa fights to keep Jo’s memories near the end, Eve found herself fighting back tears, thinking about the years ahead when she will be battling for her dad’s memories. If memory loss has touched your family, this film may hit you hard, though in a good way.
Eve also found Forgotten Island deeper than she expected, and she thinks it was made more for our generation than for children. The girls’ friendship is set in the era we grew up in, and some of the themes are decidedly adult. The Manananggal is genuinely frightening, too. Eve suspects anyone much younger than the six-year-old beside her in the theater would have nightmares. And yes, we apologize in advance to every Tagalog speaker for how we mangle the names.
Visually, Eve was reminded of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with a difference. Spider-Verse gave each spider-person a different style, while Forgotten Island holds to one style and breaks into manga when a character feels something strongly, showing us an inner emotion the other characters can’t see. I read that much of the animation was done in Philippine studios famous for anime, and that the filmmakers asked them to bring that style in as an homage to the industry there.
I’m a fan of animated movies to begin with, and Spider-Verse showed me how far animation can go in carrying a story. The anime expressions, like the big white eyes and the drop beside a character’s face, used to annoy me. In Forgotten Island, I saw them adding another layer to what is being communicated, and they are starting to grow on me. I won’t say I was wrong, but I enjoyed it.
I also found it deeper than I expected. We can usually split a movie into three or four neat themes, but this one is built on memory, with friendship layered on top like the icing on a memory cake, and I had a hard time pulling the two apart.
Eve didn’t care for the music in Forgotten Island. Much of it is pop-style covers with lyrics, and it took her a long time to find score by Nathan Matthew David that she liked. We play a little of it in the episode. I like stylized covers that match the story, and I hardly noticed the score, which for me usually means it is doing its job.
Eve also thought of Beaches (1989), where two very different girls carry a childhood friendship into divergent lives. I haven’t seen it, and I would surrender my man card if I cried at it, although Coco gets me every time, even on a plane. Jo and Raissa are a similar mismatched pair, which is where the friendship discussion begins.
What Makes a Friend a Friend in Forgotten Island?
The flashbacks do a lot of work in Forgotten Island, showing how Jo and Raissa each process everything. About halfway through, I realized Jo was far more invested in the friendship than Raissa. Raissa was a good friend, but Jo had so much more hanging on it.
Early on, a very young Jo comes into the room a little downcast and asks Raissa whether they will be friends “forever and ever,” and Raissa agrees with a seven- or eight-year-old’s enthusiasm. Only later do we learn that Jo’s grandmother, Lola, had just told her that her father was not going to send for them. Abandoned by her only living parent, Jo hung that entire lifeline on her new best friend the way only a child can. That scene made Jo’s character click into place for me, and it explained the lopsided emotional weight she puts on the friendship.
That weight got me thinking about how much we need friends at all. I grew up an introvert and still retreat into my shell often, and I’m not saying that’s bad. Like most introverts, I have two or three really good friends instead of a crowd. But we are not meant to be alone, and God said so from the beginning.
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.” (Genesis 2:18)
That verse ties to marriage, and also to the importance of social interaction in general. Galatians 6 takes it further. In English, it looks undecided about whether we carry everyone’s load or only our own.
Carry one another’s burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone considers himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Let each person examine his own work, and then he can take pride in himself alone, and not compare himself with someone else. For each person will have to carry his own load. (Galatians 6:2–5)
The Greek clears it up. In verse 2, where Paul says to carry one another’s burdens, he uses baros (?????), a tremendous, even unbearable load, the kind Atlas would carry holding up the world. In verse 5 he uses phortion (???????), the root of our word “portion,” which told the original readers he meant the allotted load we are expected to carry day to day.
Correction from Tim: I said on the recording that phortion is the root of our word “portion.” It is not; “portion” comes from the Latin portio. The contrast between the two loads still rests on how Paul uses each word in context.
So we are expected to shoulder our own portion, and when the load turns unbearable, we are supposed to lean on other people. That is what Paul was telling the church in Galatia, and I think it is reasonable to extend it to all of humanity. A lot of us struggle with that, men especially. I hate to stereotype, but the stereotypical man will not ask for directions or admit he is having emotional problems. We are not called to be that way, and one of the great things about a church family is that there are people to call.
When I first moved to Plano, I had no dresser, so I bought one, only to find it would not fit in my car. I had been to my new church twice by then, and members jumped at the chance to come with a pickup truck and haul it home. It was a small thing, but it was a blessing, and I got an unexpected afternoon of fellowship with Bob and his son while we did the work.
Eve added a caution from the other direction. Looking over my notes, she realized Jo and Raissa’s friendship was a teensy bit codependent, and a friend in college once had to push her out of that same kind of dependence. Introverts like us tend to hang everything on one good friend, and the burden on that friend can be excruciating. Friends are human, so a friendship needs give and take, not all take. There are things we are meant to carry on our own and things we should share with other people, but not always with the same person.
Measuring Love by Memory
In Forgotten Island, the charm bracelet is where Jo’s investment in the friendship becomes concrete. She added a new charm every time the girls did something worth remembering, so when Raissa admitted she couldn’t recall what one of them was for, Jo took it personally. That charm went with a mixtape Jo had stayed up all night recording off the radio, which cost more than it sounds if you grew up with boom boxes and cassettes. Eve and I both know what a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old gave up to catch exactly the right songs.
Jo took the lapse as a blow to the whole friendship. I came to see that she treated it as an accumulation of the past and present, what they had done and what they were doing, with little thought for how things would change. Raissa is a long-term thinker. To her, the friendship was a constant that would hold however their lives changed, and she would have said again what she said on the couch when they were eight: forever and ever. Neither girl could know how the other saw it until the island forced the issue.
The collision comes in the climax of Forgotten Island. Eve points out that Raissa rebukes Jo as selfish, saying the friendship had always been about Jo and never about Raissa. Eve doesn’t think Jo saw it that way, but that is how it landed. What I liked is that Raissa then realizes she hasn’t seen how Jo differs from her, either, and she risks her own memories to rescue Jo.
Neither girl could have read the other’s heart from the outside, and Scripture says as much.
The heart knows its own bitterness, and no outsider shares in its joy. (Proverbs 14:10)
The CSB Study Bible’s note on that verse says no one can completely know what another person’s heart is feeling. Trying to empathize is good, but God alone knows our hearts fully.
Raissa’s long view didn’t protect her from surprises, either. She was flying out the next morning, and then the island took them. For all her planning, the unforeseen threw her for a loop.
A person’s heart plans his way, but the LORD determines his steps. (Proverbs 16:9)
In the end, I think both girls were equally committed to the friendship, each in keeping with her own personality. When I went looking for passages on friendship, I landed on a book we don’t give the thought it deserves, and Ruth’s pledge to her mother-in-law, Naomi, is the kind of friendship I saw in Raissa and Jo.
But Ruth replied: Don’t plead with me to abandon you or to return and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD punish me, and do so severely, if anything but death separates you and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)
Eve notes that this passage is usually applied to married couples, but it was a daughter-in-law pledging herself to her mother-in-law, which gives it a fresh meaning. Ruth, a Gentile, is in the line of Christ, and so is Rahab of Jericho.
Love Wrapped in a Lie
Raissa tells Jo that going to Caltech was entirely her parents’ insistence. It wasn’t true. She said it to spare Jo’s feelings, and the lie ends up triggering the collapse of their friendship, though it works out in the end. As we said in last month’s Rental Family review, a kind motive does not erase a falsehood. The danger of lies comes up regularly in family movies. It may be low-hanging fruit, but it deserves saying: lying is bad.
Eve caught a line in the girls’ fight that fits. Manananggal, who can split into two and rejoin, says while fighting Raissa that mortals don’t go back together once they’re separated, because they are too easy to pull apart. Eve heard that as a comment on the friendship. Raissa wanted off the island to make her flight to Caltech, and Jo was enjoying every moment and in no rush to leave.
While building an index of our past episodes, I found that I had used this verse back in January 2022, in our Spider-Man: No Way Home review:
Whoever conceals an offense promotes love, but whoever gossips about it separates friends. (Proverbs 17:9)
A reasonable person could stretch that verse to cover a white lie like the one Raissa tells Jo about Caltech. It doesn’t stretch that far. Her motive was kind, but the calling is to speak the truth with grace, and grace is different from brutal honesty.
But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. (Ephesians 4:15)
The Importance of Remembering in Forgotten Island
Eve’s theme comes straight from the title of Forgotten Island. Everyone who visits the island has their memories taken by the memory demon Batiba, so no one remembers ever being there. The film comes back to one line again and again, at least three times by Eve’s count: “No matter how far apart we are, we will always be together as long as you remember.” As long as Jo and Raissa have their charms and their memories, distance can’t separate them.
Batiba doesn’t want one memory. She wants all of them from one of the girls. Going in, you expect Raissa to be the one who gives hers up, because she seems so uninterested in preserving what the two of them had. A Catholic Times review of Forgotten Island raised the same worry, that Raissa’s single-minded focus on getting home could turn her into Manananggal. Instead, Jo sacrifices her memories so Raissa can have her future. Raissa then realizes she would never have reached Caltech and NASA without Jo pushing her to do reckless things, and she goes back to battle for Jo’s memories.
Another line, “memories make you who you are,” left Eve thinking about memory as identity. She thought of Alzheimer’s and dementia, where people lose their memories and can seem to become different people. I thought of Regarding Henry (1991), where Harrison Ford’s selfish character loses his memory after being shot, learns who he was, and decides he doesn’t like that man. Eve took the thought somewhere else. Our culture brands people by whatever identity they choose, and for Christians the only identity that really matters is the one we have in Christ. So she went looking for what Scripture says about memory.
When Memory Is Worship
Eve was surprised by how much of what God ordains for Israel is about remembering. After God parts the Jordan, he has the people set up a memorial.
So Joshua summoned the twelve men he had selected from the Israelites, one man for each tribe, and said to them, “Go across to the ark of the LORD your God in the middle of the Jordan. Each of you lift a stone onto his shoulder, one for each of the Israelite tribes, so that this will be a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’ you should tell them, ‘The water of the Jordan was cut off in front of the ark of the LORD’s covenant. When it crossed the Jordan, the Jordan’s water was cut off.’ Therefore these stones will always be a memorial for the Israelites.” (Joshua 4:4–7)
The stones on Aaron’s ephod served the same purpose.
Fasten both stones on the shoulder pieces of the ephod as memorial stones for the Israelites. Aaron will carry their names on his two shoulders before the LORD as a reminder. (Exodus 28:12)
Many of the feast days and offerings in Levitical law are memorials, too, even if Leviticus is where most of our eyes glaze over. Jesus carries the idea into the New Testament at the Last Supper.
And he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, gave it to them, and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he also took the cup after supper and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” (Luke 22:19–20)
God knows how forgetful we are, so he gives us reminders, much like Jo and Raissa’s charm bracelet. The Bible is just as direct about the danger of forgetting. James describes it as forgetting your own face.
Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was. (James 1:23–24)
We are sinners saved by grace, and we are supposed to remember what God has done for us so that we act on it. That memory is also meant to travel down the generations.
Only be on your guard and diligently watch yourselves, so that you don’t forget the things your eyes have seen and so that they don’t slip from your mind as long as you live. Teach them to your children and your grandchildren. (Deuteronomy 4:9)
Forgetting carries a cost, and the cost is following other gods.
If you ever forget the LORD your God and follow other gods to serve them and bow in worship to them, I testify against you today that you will certainly perish. (Deuteronomy 8:19)
I asked what happened every time Israel forgot, and Eve’s answer was that they got in trouble, big time.
What God Chooses to Forget
Here’s the surprising part. God is all-knowing, yet he says there are sins he will remember no more.
I am the one, I sweep away your transgressions for my own sake and remember your sins no more. Remind me. Let’s argue the case together. Recount the facts, so that you may be vindicated. (Isaiah 43:25–26)
For I will forgive their wrongdoing, and I will never again remember their sins. (Hebrews 8:12)
Eve describes this as a choice not to hold our sins against us. It is unlike a husband and wife who forgive each other and then dredge it all up in an argument five years later. Once it is dealt with, it is never brought up again. In exchange, we are commanded to remember his grace and leave behind who we were.
Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12–14)
Jesus makes the same point more bluntly.
Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go and say good-bye to those at my house.” But Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61–62)
That doesn’t mean we stop repenting when we sin now. It means we stop dredging up who we were before Christ.
It is easy to think God has simply forgotten our sins, but that isn’t what Isaiah says. God doesn’t forget our sins. He removes them from us, attributes them to his Son on the cross, and forgives them because they have been paid for.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)
Paul puts the exchange plainly.
He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
It is wonderful how Scripture uses the human nature of memory to explain the unfathomable nature of God in a way that tells us everything we need to know.
“It’s Just Their Nature”: The Villains of Forgotten Island
The island that gives its name to Forgotten Island is home to the gods of Philippine mythology, and Eve was struck by the contrast with the God of Scripture. Batiba has no memories of her own, so she builds an identity by stealing other people’s and reliving them. She is redeemed at the end when Jo gives her favorite shoes, a knockoff of a name brand, to help her overcome her agoraphobia, so that she can step outside and start making memories of her own. Compare that with a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, who doesn’t need us for anything, and who still chooses to make a way for us to be with him. What a blessing.
Throughout Forgotten Island, the creatures are excused because of what they are. Batiba is a memory demon, so she steals memories, and that is simply her nature. Eve and I landed on the same point: yes, it is in our nature to sin, but that is no justification for it. It is the condemnation. Scripture agrees that sin is our nature, and it doesn’t clear us of responsibility.
We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. (Ephesians 2:3)
Romans 3:23 is the one everybody knows.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)
James explains how temptation turns into sin.
But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death. (James 1:14–15)
Once we belong to Christ, we are supposed to put that old nature to death.
For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is freed from sin… Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its desires. (Romans 6:6–7, 12)
Eve’s way of putting it was that we’re not to justify who we were but to sanctify who we have become in Christ.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17)
Paul reminds the Corinthians of exactly that change in their lives.
Don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God’s kingdom? Do not be deceived: No sexually immoral people, idolaters, adulterers, or males who have sex with males, no thieves, greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive people, or swindlers will inherit God’s kingdom. And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9–11)
You don’t get off the hook of responsibility; you get forgiven. That is the essence of the gospel. It isn’t in Forgotten Island, but this is an easy movie to get to the gospel from. As I put it on the recording, our sin does have to be paid for, and Christ has paid for it.
I’m unusually concerned with people taking responsibility, probably to my detriment, and the ending bothered me on that count. When Manananggal gets her stolen core memory back, Forgotten Island still says she had been murdering people. Did the missing memory excuse that? No. Yet there is no mention that she will pay for it. It felt like the film was writing it off as the nature of a demon that can split in two and reform. Eve noted that Manananggal seemed a little less demonic when she came out of the cave, and she did.
Batiba always assumed the memories she took wouldn’t be missed, and Manananggal ‘s clearly were. Losing them made her a different person, which is Eve’s memory-as-identity point at work.
One reason I liked this movie so much goes back to our Kubo and the Two Strings review: the insight it gives into the culture that made it. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who wrote and directed Forgotten Island, were set on highlighting Filipino culture and mythology, and they did a great job, even if there is so much mythology and so many characters that it sometimes distracts from the core of the story. Several voice actors pulled double, triple, even quintuple duty in Forgotten Island. Here’s an Easter egg: Lea Salonga, who voices Manananggal, was the original singing voice of both Jasmine in Aladdin and Mulan.
Conclusion
We both loved how Forgotten Island ties up Jo and Raissa’s friendship. Jo becomes a famous writer who honors Lola by sharing her stories, and her fans fill an auditorium dressed as her characters, just as she was at the beginning. Eve was thankful we never see who Jo would have been without her memories of Raissa.
We talked about friends who carry each other’s burdens and speak the truth with grace, about a God who commands us to remember and removes our sins instead of holding them against us, and about the claim that sin is simply our nature, which condemns us instead of excusing us.
It is worth seeing, but leave the little kids at home, because Manananggal is genuinely frightening. If you go, take what we said into the theater with your family, and we pray it opens a conversation about memory, friendship, and the gospel: we all need the blood of Christ, because it is our nature to sin.
And don’t just watch.
Where to watch Forgotten Island
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