Wolfwalkers Review

Ready for a fun fact? Ten out of the last twelve Best Animated Feature awards at the Academy Awards have gone to Disney and Pixar films. That’s about an 83% success rate. And while awards aren’t the real measure of a movie’s quality, it sure seems like Disney and Pixar are the first and last words in animation.

But a challenger approaches.

Cartoon Saloon is and Irish animation studio with fantastic animated movies that almost no one is watching.

Take Wolfwalkers. The film is set in Ireland in the 1600s. The English have invaded and are forcing the Irish citizens to cut down their forests to make room for more farmland, risking the anger and danger of the wolves in the wood. But it’s not just wolves. There are also Wolfwalkers (like the title, see): humans who can transform into wolves in their sleep and rule the forest. One is a little girl named Mebh.

On the other side of the forest is an English girl named Robyn Goodfellowe, who can’t wait to join her father on the wolf hunts...

Now that’s how you set up a film.

The story works great for a family movie: there’s loads of charm and fun juxtaposed with grim villainy… and boy, is it grim. The film dances on the line between family-friendly and truly unsettling, but it doesn’t cross it. Mebh and Robyn’s connection is a cornerstone of the film, and the story builds on it wonderfully as each discovers the other’s world.

But the story could reasonably have been created by another studio, though it may have lost some of the heart. The thing that really sets Wolfwalkers, and all the rest of Cartoon Saloon’s films apart, is the art. Wolfwalkers isn’t trying to be the new Disney. It’s made its own style.

Behold:

This shot can’t be in the film for more than a second in a half, but it’s so lovingly made and so unlike anything else. This one image tells a story: a girl in a geometric house like the rest in her geometric town being visited by something different: the smooth lines and curves of nature, as depicted in old Celtic illustrations. The wolf is a beautiful image and so eye-catching you might not notice the crossbow and arrows in either corner, or the hunting hawk looking directly at the wolf like it knows a secret.

Now imagine an hour and forty minutes of these little paintings flashing on screen and taking you to another time and place. Why aren’t more people talking about it?!

Because it was only on Apple+ for more than a year, mostly. Which is such a shame, because especially during the worst lock-down months of the pandemic, I think this one would have found its way into a lot of kids’ hearts if they had the chance to see it.

Well, now they can. In December, the film was finally released on Blu-Ray, and I think it more than deserves checking out if you’re a fan of family movies, art, werewolves, or all of the above. It’s a film that succeeds perfectly at being itself. Five wolves out of five.