Embrace the Beauty of Cartoon Saloon’s Irish Folklore Trilogy

Start the new year with a beautiful box set from a group of creative souls who are keeping traditions alive. It’s not just that the geniuses of Cartoon Saloon embrace the increasingly lost art of hand-drawn animation, but that they draw on classic storytelling concepts, using mythology to fuel their original stories. They have only released four films, but each of them is a captivating work of art on their own while also achieving a remarkable cumulative power when appreciated as a whole piece—a sequence of studies in how our history and our mythology connects to universal themes of today. They’re also simply beautiful films in terms of artwork, the kind of movies wherein a majority of paused frames could be hung on your wall. They look incredible in this box set, which also includes a poster, new special features, and a book of artwork that includes an informative and impassioned essay by Andrew Crump.

The Kilkenny-based Cartoon Saloon started life in 1999, founded by Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey, and Paul Young, starting work on what would be their first feature that same year. It would be a decade before “The Secret of Kells” was released in theatres, an imagining of the making of the Book of Kells from the 9^th century. Directed by Moore and Twomey (and produced by Young), it’s set during the Viking expansion in Ireland in the 10^th century, centering the story of a boy living in an abbey in Kells. (The narrative connections between this one and “Wolfwalkers” are striking when the trilogy can be watched consecutively in that both center stories of people trapped in their community with unknown forces outside the walls.)

The boy meets a fairy named Aisling, and the two work together to finish work on a legendary book that “turns darkness into light”. The Book of Kells is a book in Latin that collects the four Gospels of the New Testament while also drawing on Celtic mythology. The artists of Cartoon Saloon are using classic hand-drawn animation—a technique that was really disappearing in the 2000s as this film was in production—to tell a classic tale themselves. It’s a beautiful film about how legends are passed down over the generations, inspired by Celtic art, “The Thief and the Cobbler,” Hayao Miyazaki, and even “Mulan.” It announced Cartoon Saloon as a major creative force, landing them their first Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film (all four of their works have accomplished this, but they have yet to land their first win).

Sadly, “The Secret of Kells” was the only film that Roger Ebert was able to review, but he admired it for how much it stood out from the animated landscape, writing, “Indeed, in a season where animated images hurl themselves from the screen with alarming recklessness, I was grateful that these were content merely to be admired.”

It took five more years to make the second film in the “Irish Folklore Trilogy,” the gorgeous “Song of the Sea,” directed by Moore from a story by him, with screenwriting credit to Will Collins. The only contemporary film in the trilogy, it again centers a boy, this one named Ben. He discovers the truth about his mute sister Saoirse, who he blames for the death of their mother. It turns out that mom was a selkie, a creature from the sea. Once again, “Song of the Sea” is a beautiful piece of artwork—maybe my favorite of the three when it comes purely to imagery. The sharp lines of the characters are off-set against more painterly images in the background, ones in which you can almost see the brushstrokes.