TIFF20: Wolfwalkers
As he did before in The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, Tomm Moore has created a lovely animated adventure in Wolfwalkers, which mines Irish history and mythology for all its worth. The film is a touching family drama about the tensions between a father and daughter, the city and the forest, England and Ireland, and humankind and nature. As with all the previous features of independent animation studio Cartoon Saloon like the aforementioned The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers has stunning animation inspired by illuminated manuscripts and medieval iconography. It’s stunningly two-dimensional, and incredibly bold, not only for how it captures multiple perspectives and angles within an individual animated frame, but also for how it embodies the tensions between England and Ireland within the animation itself. It’s a remarkable animated work that cements its animation studio as one of the very best in the business.
Working alongside co-director Ross Stewart, Moore takes us to mid-17th century Ireland and the life of Robyn Goodfellowe (Honor Kneafsey), an English girl who came over with her father, Bill (Sean Bean). Bill hunts wolves for Oliver Cromwell and the invading English. Robyn is sick of being cooped up in the cramped avenues of Kilkenny, which Moore and Stewart animate in fascinatingly oppressive geometrical detail. She also dreads being forced into Puritan servitude in the kitchens, like the other women and girls, so she dreams of accompanying her father into the woods to hunt wolves and enjoy the freedom of the wild. When she finally gets her wish, she comes face to face with Mebh MacTire (Eva Whittaker), an Irish girl who lives with the wolves and has special powers as a wolfwalker: a kind of werewolf who is a girl when awake, but who manifests a wolf-form when she sleeps.
Robyn thinks Mebh is a threat until she realizes that Mebh has mystical healing powers when she repairs the wing of her pet raptor, Merlin. She bonds with Mebh over her anxieties about her mother; it turns out that Mebh’s mother, Moll (Maria Doyle Kennedy), is also a wolfwalker, but her wolf-form has strangely not returned to her body, which has kept her human body in a deep sleep. Robyn lost her mother back in England and so as the two girls bond, Robyn aims to help Mebh find her mother. Of course, this conflicts with the work of Robyn’s father, who seeks to purge the forest of wolves so the English can clear the countryside to make way for more towns and cities. Robyn knows she cannot serve her father’s commands, and by extension the edicts of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (Simon McBurney), if she is to help Mebh and be true to herself. Therein lies the rich dramatic conflict at the heart of the film.
Like with The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers explores the tensions of Ireland, a nation torn between paganism and Christianity, Irish Catholicism and English Protestantism, Celtic and English history, and nature and civilization. It personifies the two sides of this divide in Robyn and Mebh and uses them as avatars to explore a possible balance between the two. Of course, nothing is simple in Wolfwalkers, just as nothing is simple in Ireland. Even if Robyn and Mebh are drawn together by their love for their parents and their appreciation for nature, they are beholden to the world around them.
Robyn’s father serves Cromwell, whose brutal conquest of Ireland reshaped its history and literally purged the land of the Irish wolf, which went extinct due to aggressive hunting at the hands of English contractors. Cromwell’s Puritanism cannot accept a delicate balance between nature’s dualities: the natural world is something for man to conquer just as he conquers the weaknesses of the flesh. Mebh’s mother serves an older, pagan power, which can bend reality through magic, but respects its natural ebb and flow. The Irish Catholic peasants in the film represent a go-between, respecting the natural heritage of their land while still following the tradition laid out by Saint Patrick. It is clear that the Irish filmmakers sympathize more with the pagans in Wolfwalkers, but there are no easy answers to the tensions that bring conflict to a head, other than the need for love and understanding. Robyn and Bill are colonial agents at first, but they are capable of changing and finding peace with those they are meant to colonize.
The film’s narrative structure bears more than a passing resemblance to that of The Secret of Kells, which also explored the friendship between a Christian and a pagan in an Ireland in the midst of change due to conquest. However, in that film, the invading Vikings are the avatars of destruction forcing death on Irish culture, even if the Catholic culture of the monks seeks to convert the pagan culture of the native Irish. The Christian and pagan heroes are culturally at cross purposes, but there is an external foe that seeks to do both of them harm.
In Wolfwalkers, Moore and Stewart fruitfully decide to make the English characters embody both the militaristic and cultural sides of conquest; they combine the aspects of both the monks and the Vikings from Kells. Thus, in charting the story of how the Puritan Robyn and Bill make peace with the wilds of Ireland and its Catholic present and pagan past, the film’s arc of redemption and community reflects the still vital issue of finding peace in modern Ireland. It demonstrates a moral capacity for change that isn’t present when the villains are presented as faceless monsters such as they are in The Secret of Kells.
Even if the ostensible target audience of children may not appreciate the nuance of the cultural tensions in the film, they’ll surely be stunned by the glorious animation. It’s impossible to overstate the film’s beauty. Like The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and to a lesser-extent The Breadwinner, Wolfwalkers draws inspiration from illuminated manuscripts and medieval styles of drawing in its flat animation style. Perspectives are flattened, characters are highly-stylized, and often multiple angles are conveyed in one drawn frame.
For example, the sky is rarely depicted in the film. When Robyn stands on the hillside overlooking the city of Kilkenny, you don’t see the horizon, but instead, an aerial view of the rooftops of the city fill the upper part of the frame, the rows of spires and stone walls contrasting with the smooth, flowing lines of the woods. Moore, Stewart, and their team of animators take advantage of the freedom of animation to liberate the film from a fixed visual perspective; the result is marvellous.
The colours are rich and textured—bright and vibrant in the forest and washed out like stone in the city. The palette changes between city and forest represents the difference between dour Puritanism and naturalistic paganism. But the animation goes deeper than this in depicting the thematic divide between English and Irish. The animation of the city is rigidly geometrical and crisp. Lines meet at sharp angels and colours are solid across. In the forest, the animators leave traces of their pencil marks beneath the finished animations and accentuate the natural flow of nature with curving lines and overlapping patterns. The aetherial score by regular collaborators Bruno Coulais and the folk group Kíla further accentuates the palpable atmosphere and mystery in the film.
Such a complex aesthetic approach underlies just how nuanced the entire film is. It works wonderfully as an empowering adventure for children. The lessons of tolerance and freedom and the need for balance are well heeded in our current age of division. But students of history will also appreciate the film’s deep historicism, in how it incorporates the historical record into its fictionalized tale of magic and adventure and draws out the conflicts of history in the process. It’s a wise film about the need for healing and the possibilities of redemption. Most importantly, it’s a beautiful work of art, a demonstration that two-dimensional hand-drawn animation will forever hold more vibrancy and nuance than even the most complex computer generated effects. Wolfwalkers is remarkable. I hope it finds the audience it deserves.
9 out of 10
Wolfwalkers (2020, Ireland/Luxembourg/USA)
Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart; written by Will Collins, based on a story by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart; starring Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Simon McBurney.