91 min | PG | June 30, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Ruby Gillman is a shy high schooler who learns she descends from a line of giant sea krakens sworn to guard the ocean. Becoming a hero means embracing the exact thing her mother told her to hide. You have seen this movie before, and you saw it done better.
Ruby Gillman is a teenage girl who hides a secret. She and her family are krakens disguised as humans in a sleepy coastal town. Her mother forbids her from ever entering the ocean. Ruby breaks the rule, transforms into a towering sea creature, and discovers she descends from a line of warrior queens. The film wraps a coming-of-age story around the oldest lesson in the animation playbook. The thing you were told to hide is the thing that makes you powerful.
Lana Condor voices Ruby with anxious, fidgety energy that fits a wallflower trying to survive high school. She plays the math nerd and the reluctant giant without straining for either register. Toni Collette voices Agatha, Ruby’s mother, as a parent whose protection curdles into control. Annie Murphy voices Chelsea Van Der Zee, the popular new girl who befriends Ruby and hides her own agenda. Murphy gives the character a bright surface that cracks open right on cue. Sam Richardson voices Uncle Brill with a loose, improvisational warmth that lands most of the film’s actual laughs.
Kirk DeMicco directs from a script by Pam Brady, Brian C. Brown, and Elliott DiGuiseppi. The animation leans hard on color to separate the two worlds Ruby moves between. The high school scenes stay flat and muted. The underwater kraken sequences flood the screen with bioluminescent pinks and electric blues that pulse like a nightclub. The character designs give the krakens soft, rounded silhouettes that telegraph friendliness before anyone speaks a word. The script never matches that visual confidence and reaches for plot beats you can call out a reel ahead.
The pieces work in isolation. The villain turn is genuinely sharp. The mother-daughter conflict carries real weight under the cartoon surface. The problem is that every beat arrives borrowed from a stronger film. Ruby Gillman moves fast and looks bright and never finds a reason to exist beyond the ones other movies already supplied. It is a competent assembly of parts you have watched click together before.