Wolfwalkers Review

Cartoon Saloon's third Irish folklore film is the one where the studio's house style becomes an argument rather than a decoration. Kilkenny under English occupation is drawn in hard straight lines, cages and grids and right angles, and the forest outside it in loose charcoal scribble that never stops moving. The whole picture is a fight between two drawing styles, and you can read the plot off the linework alone. Robyn wants to be a hunter like her father and instead becomes the thing he was hired to kill, a familiar shape given real weight by how much the film likes the father and how little it wants to make him a villain.

The wolf-vision passages, rendered as smeared scent trails in white on black, are the most inventive animation of the year in any format. Honor Kneafsey and Eva Whittaker give the two girls a scratchy, genuine friendship. The Lord Protector is a thin villain and the resolution arrives fast for a film otherwise this patient. But hand-drawn animation this confident, made well outside the studios that dominate the form, is worth going out of your way for.