Two years ago the English-speaking internet world was shaken by the news that Japan's most beloved animation house, Studio Ghibli, would be closing its doors for good. The story, which originated from a fan blog and was picked up by a variety of more reputable outlets that should've known better, quickly proved to be erroneous — the product of an overzealous translation of remarks made by one of Ghibli's co-founders, producer Toshio Suzuki.

Yet it wasn't so clear what Suzuki had meant when he talked about the company taking a "break" from anime production following the release of Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2014 film, "When Marnie Was There." With the studio's one surefire box-office draw, Hayao Miyazaki, now officially retired and its staff of full-time animators disbanded, did it even have a future?

"The Red Turtle" offers an answer to that question, though it's a potentially misleading one. The first film since 2014 to bear the Studio Ghibli imprimatur is an outlier in the company's oeuvre: an international co-production helmed by a Dutch director, animated in France, and delivered entirely without dialogue.