Maria Doyle Kennedy

Wolfwalkers review: Irish folklore meets English oppression, to beautiful effect

• Dirs: Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart; Cast (voices): Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Simon McBurney. Cert tbc; 100 mins The Irish animation outfit Cartoon Saloon do things their own way. Instead of the show-offy depth of most features animated in three dimensions, their art is deliberately 2D, drawn on purpose as if by a child that hasn’t been taught perspective yet. Backgrounds and foregrounds jostle on the same flat plane, creating a captivatingly naïve, woodblock look. It can take a moment for your brain to do the organising. Meanwhile, their imagery and colours dance and swirl: they have a love of rotating, circular effects where life and magic are all in the curve. All three of their features to date – The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014) and The Breadwinner (2017) – succeeded in getting Oscar-nominated, which is quite a hat-trick. Their latest, Wolfwalkers, takes us deep into the forests of Ireland at an intriguingly specific moment in history – it’s set in the 1650s, under Cromwell’s occupation, and the villainous character of its dour Lord Protector, voiced by Simon McBurney, is somewhere between Witchfinder General and misery-guts Cromwell himself. The film is crowded with tensions – between English and Irish, patriarchs and rebellious young girls, humans and wolves. Blonde teenager Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) has arrived in the fortress city of Kilkenny with her father, Bill Goodfellowe (an instantly guessable Sean Bean), whose job is to tame the surrounding wilds, by setting traps in the forest for the rampant wolves associated with all things ancient and magical in the land.