Few of the 2010 Oscar nominations emerged from deeper in left field than the nod for Best Animated Feature to The Secret of Kells, an independent Irish/French coproduction that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in January 2009. When I stumbled across a copy at a friend’s place in December I found myself enchanted, but surprised that I had never heard of the film. I only realized that it was a recent release when the title turned up on the nominations list last week. Here’s to hoping that director Tomm Moore and company now have the leverage to achieve a higher level of media exposure in North America. The film deserves the recent boost in attention.
This highly stylized animated story centres on Brendan, an apprentice text illuminator living in 8th Century Ireland. It is a time of transition from Paganism to Christianity, when the fear of Viking raids dominates daily existence. The film presents a speculative history behind the creation of the real-life Book of Kells, a masterpiece of illuminated Christian text.
Moore takes his aesthetic cues from his source material, rendering his world in extreme 2D relief. This approach is stunningly beautiful. The look of the animation feels fresh and contemporary, while also evoking the ancient visual textures and atmosphere of its subject matter. Restricting the depth in the compositions frees the animators from any concern for realism, allowing them to interpret environments and action as living celtic scrollwork. We see not the forest, but the cultural conceptions of the forest in that era. Moore pushes this engagement with stylized representation to significant thematic impact, achieving sequences of kinetic conflict that depict the philosophical tensions of the mediaeval age in purely visual terms, as in the clip below:
The script seems oddly structured in places. I’m torn between celebrating the unconventional pacing or chalking it up to uneven writing. Perhaps the narrative flow does stumble a little towards the end, much like in the other near-great animated film that Kells likely wrestled its Oscar nomination away from: Ponyo.
