Headscratchers / The Red Turtle

• Why did the Red Turtle keep smashing the guy's raft?
  • I assume that the island is very far from civilization, and if he tries to get home via raft he's just going to die in the middle of the ocean somewhere. The turtle is trying to prevent this. (But since nobody talks in this movie, the turtle never gets to explain her intentions out loud.)
    • But their son leaves later on, and nobody seems to think that he won't get where he's going.
    • The son is part turtle. He can survive the trip.

• Did nobody think that maybe one of the turtle-people could go get help? Like, swim to civilization and tell someone that there's a man trapped on this island and he'd like to go home.
  • The theme of the movie is "man is not separate from nature." Devising a clever way to get him back to civilization would throw off the whole theme. For a less-meta explanation, we see that the man gives up on building rafts, and we can only assume that this was because he changed his mind and decided that he actually preferred living on the island.

• Why did they build a bonfire after the tsunami? At first I thought it was a signal fire, like "Ok nevermind, we don't want to live on this island anymore if it means we have to live with deadly tsunamis. Maybe a fire will get someone's attention and they can rescue us." But they didn't seem to be looking for rescue after that.
  • Maybe they just like bonfires?
  • On the flipside, this troper thought they were just burning the leftover bamboo, which would inadvertently be bringing attention to the island by passing ships and would result in the family being pulled away from it in a rescue effort.

• Where did the son go?
  • He went to live his own life, apparently. It's unclear if he intended to just swim in the sea like a turtle, or if he went to visit civilization (which his father told him about via sand-drawings).