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Cartoon Saloon helmers Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart talk about the innovations used in their stunning new movie Wolfwalkers. n another example of how inspiring animated projects can lift spirits even during the darkest years, Cartoon Saloon’s much-anticipated feature Wolfwalkers arrives in select theaters via GKIDS this month, and will be available for streaming via Apple TV+ in December. This third offering in Tomm Moore’s Irish folklore triptych (which includes The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea) is astounding both in terms of its inventive storyline and characters and its creative use of the medium. The film’s narrative takes us back to Kilkenny, Ireland in the mid-17th century, where we meet Robyn, a young English apprentice hunter who comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack of wolves in the country. Her life changes after she saves a native www.animationmagazine.net
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girl named Mebh, who leads her to the discovery of the magical “wolfwalkers” and her transformation into the very thing her father (voiced by Sean Bean) is tasked to destroy. The exquisitely crafted film has been a labor of love for the team at Cartoon Saloon for many years. Moore says Ross Stewart, who co-directed the movie with him, recently found a notebook where they had taken down notes and ideas about Wolfwalkers some seven years ago. “The story has evolved so much since then,” says Moore. “The production officially began about three and half years ago. We had a much bigger budget than we had for Song of the Sea. That’s why we were able to incorporate some of the ideas that we had for the first two movies, but weren’t able to execute them at the time due to budgetary limitations.”
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“Ross and I were inspired by the legends of wolfwalkers in Kilkenny, which we learned about when we were kids,” says Moore. “It’s basically the Irish version of a werewolf story, where they would leave their bodies and traverse the forests as wolves, while the human bodies would be asleep back at home.”
One of the cleverly executed ideas that echoes throughout the film is the way the characters and environments related to the forest are distinguished from those associated with the rigid human world and the English arrivals. “Those stylistic differences were baked in from the beginning when we were developing the story,” explains Moore, who was the art director on Moore’s two previous movies. “We wanted to december20
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