My Father’s Dragon, review: if only more films like this were still being made

Of all the animation houses still working in the hand-drawn style, Cartoon Saloon is the one that lets you feel the hands themselves. The Irish studio's films move as if they’re being created right before your eyes – clouds part in flurries of brushstrokes, waves crash like capsized pots of paint, characters move with the vigour of a page of freehand sketches.

Their fifth feature, directed by the studio’s co-founder Nora Twomey, unfolds like a primary school art lesson – gloriously weird ideas and gorgeously bizarre images are splotched around so giddily, even while watching it you feel as if you should be wearing a smock.

The script by Meg LeFauve, a co-writer on Pixar’s Inside Out, is a sharp, inventive adaptation of a 1948 children’s book by Ruth Stiles Garnett, in which a boy called Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) runs off to the faraway Wild Island and rescues a dragon from a life of servitude. But LeFauve adjusts Garnett’s story to give it a more mystical, folklorish edge.

The dragon – a loveable, rugby-striped dunderhead called Boris (Gaten Matarazzo) – isn’t ferrying lazy animals across a river any more, but heaving the island itself aloft, as it regularly slips beneath the ocean’s surface, dragged down by enormous, tree-trunk-thick roots.

He’s been set this Sisyphean task by a local parliament of apes led by Saiwa, a gruff silverback voiced by Ian McShane, who largely keep themselves apart from the island’s other inhabitants. These include a kindly rhinoceros (Dianne Wiest) and her calf, a family of overgrown pussy-cat-like tigers, and a crocodile (Alan Cumming) who less resembles Captain Hook’s arch-nemesis in Disney’s take on Peter Pan than a Victorian approximation of an ichthyosaur, with his large, beady eye and thorny jaws.

Elmer’s quest takes him through all of these creatures’ jungly habitats, which are rich in imaginative details that hark back obliquely to the vast, gloomy metropolis from which the lad fled. This is where the intriguing framing narrative plays out, involving a curmudgeonly landlady (Rita Moreno), an inscrutable stray cat (Whoopi Goldberg) and Elmer’s mother Dela (Golshifteh Farahani), a shopkeeper in search of new premises but perilously low on funds.

The film craftily resists the temptation to draw obvious allegorical links between these two realms, but rather presents us with a few wilfully mysterious points of overlap. Tangerines are one such recurring item: tumbling from a crate in one world, and growing thickly on a cluster of cirrus-shaped trees in the next.

Against this enticing, enigmatic backdrop, the odd sops to mainstream taste –  some comic shrieking, a sprinkling of toilet humour – feel unnecessary, but forgivable. It’s the sort of film you’re relieved to discover still exists.

On Netflix from Friday November 11