5 Ways We Love That ‘90s Girlhood Is Celebrated in DreamWorks Forgotten Island
The nostalgia is strong with this one.
This past weekend, DreamWorks' Forgotten Island hit the big screen, and I’ve never felt so seen as a girl who grew up in the late ‘90s. The film is a powerful love letter to friendship fueled by everything we loved about the fantasy adventure stories in the girl power era.
Brought to animation fans by the team behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, filmmakers Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado tell a coming-of-age story that’s a throwback to those hard goodbyes before the internet era that would follow post-Y2K. The bond between the chaotic adventure-seeking Jo (H.E.R.) and brainy but headstrong Raissa (Liza Soberano) reminded me so much of my childhood bestie and growing up together before she moved to the other side of the world. When the credits rolled, I wanted to open a magical portal to meet her and watch it all over again so we could talk about all the ways the movie got our teen years right.
Here are the five ways that best captured real BFF throwbacks to growing up at the turn of the millennium.
Friendship Charm Bracelets
Yeah, we know that Taylor Swift helped bring back the beaded friendship bracelets, but some of us have been waiting for the charm ones to make a comeback. In Forgotten Island, Jo and Raissa meet as kids and over the years collect charms that represent core memories with trinkets they make: the homemade mini yarn toy version of the Manananggal, a vampiric folklore entity they bonded over as little girls, a mixtape charm to represent the music Jo would put together for Raissa.
Seeing how packed those bracelets got as they grew older will speak to those of us who sought out the most jangly of charms to honor our BFFs. Bring it back, we beg!
Sharing Multicultural Celebrations
In the film, Raissa has a going-away-to-college party filled with her family’s Filipino traditions. There’s karaoke, lechon at the cookout with a Jesus photo nearby, and meddling aunts and uncles—the kind of cultural staples that, like Jo, my best friend would get to experience when she’d come over for family celebrations.
Whether it's a Carne Asada (like it was in my case) or a family BBQ, it speaks to how multicultural family moments can include your found family, no matter what your relatives might think.
Mixtapes
Picture it: You crack open a blank cassette tape, unwrap the plastic with your nail, and hear the hinge of the case as you pluck it out in a race to beat the DJ from playing the song you’ve been waiting for all day before smashing that record button with satisfaction. We love a throwback, and one of the film's main threads is Jo’s mixtape for Raissa and how she painstakingly curated it.
It made me want to immediately dig out my boombox from storage and listen to the tapes my bestie and I would make with songs inspired by our crushes or sleepovers. Many of the songs we used were in the movie too; the needle drops were so good.
No Screen Adventures
A big part of girlhood that was authentically represented was reliving the moments when you got to get out of the house and get into formative trouble. What a joy to remember those years where you and your best friend had each other’s back to face the world together and overcome any obstacle or share the embarrassment of getting caught!
Supernatural Action Vibes
For the girlies who loved Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Forgotten Island has that creature-of-the-week vibe in the form of Filipino folklore. In it, Jo and Raissa take one last journey together before going their separate ways when they find the Forgotten Island Jo’s Lola (grandmother) told them stories about before she passed.
Among the cultural entities and cryptids is a 200-year-old baby demon, Bungi, voiced by Manny Jacinto (The Acolyte), and the legendary Lea Salonga (singing voice of Princess Jasmine in Aladdin) plays a badass vampiric entity, The Dreaded Manang. Together, Jo and Raissa face their inner demons while encountering very real supernatural ones that reflect their internal struggles before they go their separate ways.
Girls raised by their grandmothers in the ‘90s, raise your hands! The lore is exactly the kind we would obsess over as young teen girls on that fan-fiction-to-professional-writer pipeline.
Forgotten Island is out now; go see it with your bestie and bring your kids. Maybe they’ll bring back mixtapes too.
