The latest from Cartoon Saloon is another smash for director Tomm Moore, this time co-directing with Ross Stewart. While it’s not as narratively devastating as Song Of The Sea or The Breadwinner, it blends the earthy mythological magic of the former with the political clarity of the latter to exhilarating effect. Needless to say, it also looks gorgeous. I tried my hand at recreating and redesigning a still from the film (the original is available to view at Cartoon Saloon’s website here). What follows is a mildly spoilery discussion of my painting, below, and its relationship to the film.
I started with a blank canvass and sketched as faithful a copy of the shapes in the original still as I could (if proof were needed that I’m just starting out in the digital art game, turn the above image sideways and see how long Robyn’s face is. Standing up she’d probably look like Mr Burns when everyone thinks he’s that alien; “I bring you loooove”). I also tried to replicate the distinctive woodcut-print aesthetics of the rug and the roof matting, a very time-consuming endeavour that gave me even more respect for everyone at Cartoon Saloon, already my favourite animation studio (though to be fair to me I imagine they have something a little more powerful than Procreate on an iPad to work with — though then again perhaps not, no idea). With the exception of Roby’s body and her bird Merlyn, I tried to totally redesign their colour scheme, however: the original shows a golden wolf projecting a misty golden glow throughout a brown room with dull purple shadows against a blue night-time backdrop out the window.
Wolfwalkers is the story of a girl, Robyn Goodfellowe, who travels with her father from Yorkshire to Kilkenny in Ireland to join Oliver Cromwell and his community of immigrant Brits in their efforts to cultivate, colonise and (in their words) ‘civilise’ the agrarian Irish wilds. A keen amateur markswoman, she’s desperate to join her father, a wolf-hunter, in his daily excursions into the woods but he insists on abandoning her at home for her own protection. The story concerns her rebellious excursions and her growing fascination with the wolves of the nearby forest and their mythological guardians, the titular wolfwalkers: spirit-people with wolfy souls who can converse with their animal friends and who physically become one of them at night while their human body sleeps. As Robyn grows increasingly disillusioned with the Cromwellian project and increasingly alienated from her dutiful and unquestioning father she grows closer to the imperiled natural community just outside the town’s walls.
Mild spoiler time. The still that I painted depicts a pivotal moment in the film wherein Robyn’s wolf-spirit departs her human form for the first time. Having made friends with a scrappy young wolfwalker called Mebh — who was, bar her perpetually slumbering mother, the last of her kind in the forest — she is unwittingly inducted into their community after Mebh accidentally bites her, transforming her into another wolfwalker. Merlyn, Robyn’s non-lingual communicative bridge with the natural world, looks on calmly as the girl perceives her humanity from an out-of-body, non-human perspective for the first time, immediately before taking physical form as a wolf and, panicking, awakening her startled, bloodthirsty huntsman father.
I decided to change the colour-scheme for two reasons. The first is that it seemed like a good experimental balance against faithfully reproducing the shapes of the original image. I’m trying to learn how to use these tools (this is my second ‘digital painting’) and here was an opportunity to mix observation and creativity, surely an important step on the way to becoming an independent artist/animator in my own right… The second reason was that I was inspired by another scene in the film that quickly follows this one. Robyn, in physical wolf-form, flees the town and meets up with Mebh, who inducts her in the ways and pleasures of lupine existence. Robyn is understandably frightened by this radically novel experience but her friend soon shows her how fun and exciting, even ecstatic, life as a wolf can be. They run through the forest at night with the wolfpack trailing them as the big soundtrack highlight plays. Robyn’s first-person viewpoint as a wolf (which had revealed itself to her previously in indicative, less dissociative dreams) is depicted as a chalky monochrome world with iridescent red or yellow movements highlighting her body and those of her wolf companions, in a similar manner to the translucent red spirit in my painting. The luscious moonlit forest sings in hues similar to the corners of her attic room in my painting, too.
The sequence in which Robyn awakens as a wolf dissociating from her human body and then learns how to live as a wolf through the teaching of her friend reminded me of the philosophical question of qualia, the boundaries of human consciousness and the apparent impossibility of transcending them through language or perception. I’m no philosopher but I’ve seen animal analogies approach this topic, prevalent perhaps because we know a lot about how different animal consciousnesses are from our own but we can’t directly experience (or perhaps, therefore, fully understand) them. Here is a scene, in a children’s animated film, in which the filmmakers take on this challenge and construct a depiction of animal consciousness from a first-person perspective, one that is not anthropomorphised but rather visually very differentiated from the same film’s depictions of human perception. Here, next, is another scene in which a heretofore human child teaches her heretofore human friend how to live as a wolf — not just how to behave or even think as a wolf, but how to directly perceive the world (one fun example: she gets Robyn to close her eyes and ‘see’ the contours of the world through her newly hyperattentive sense of smell). This rides roughshod over our current psychological, linguistic and philosophical limitations around the question of building an empathetic psychological bridge with animals.
This very question is one that drives the film, ethically speaking. Tomm Moore is an outspoken vegan who has done animated work for Greenpeace in the past, and the film makes clear statements in a similar vein. Religious fanaticism blinds Cromwell and his cohort to the experience and value of the forest and its inhabitants and prevents them from understanding when the wolfwalkers make impassioned pleas for cohabitation, even when the wolfwalkers protest that they actually would like to make space for the British people anyway without their having to burn down their arboreal home. One of the film’s great successes, I think in an area that builds even on the remarkably intelligent The Breadwinner from Nora Twomy (a personal favourite of mine, also produced by Tomm Moore), is that it organically establishes an outspoken and coherent political intersectionality here. A fictionalised account of Cromwell’s real genocidal and ecocidal campaign in Ireland interlinks enduring sociopolitical concerns with a paean to environmental compassion. Cromwell attacks Irishman and wolf alike because he sees both as uncivilised, inhuman, and you don’t have to watch Moore’s Greenpeace short advocating for industrial restraint in the Amazon to clock the obvious political analogues today.
So Wolfwalkers achieves the goal of the philosophical thought experiments, in a way: it establishes an empathetic connection with animals, with a natural, non-human perspective. It may get there through fanciful, creative application of the imagination but if it inspires anyone to live a more environmentally conscious life then it will have deepened and strengthened humanity’s relationship with nature in a way that runs parallel to philosophical and scientific enquiry. But the real reason I actually love this (beyond just finding it very interesting) is that the way that it gets there is through a child’s dream. Having spent a lot of time watching films with my five-year old stepson recently, I’ve seen the good and the bad of children’s entertainment, even just of depictions of animal life in children’s entertainment (for the good, see the ongoing Netflix series Hilda, rather a nordic take on Studio Ghibli’s enchanted natural fantasy work; for the bad, see the dispiriting 2016 animated film Robinson Crusoe aka The Wild Life, depending on which part of the world you live in — both artworks fairly well enjoyed by young Odin, I should say). Amid so much snarky, misdirected and misleading dreck, what really sticks out and touches my heartstrings is when a children’s film can be successful while actually being a children’s film, about children’s experience, not just loud animated clatter with nudgey-winky jokes for adults and plastic slapstick for kids. A wonderful, exhilarating (slightly scary then extremely fun) dream in which you transform into an animal, a cool animal like a wolf, then play with your friends — also suddenly animals — while reveling in the unique experience of your new form: that rings so true to me as a depiction of a child’s mentality. Odin has dreams like that all the time; they even crop up in his imaginative games on a pretty much daily basis.
He wasn’t there when I watched Wolfwalkers but he will be next time. It’s a great film with a simple story for children and an important, plainly communicated ethical message that would benefit kids and adults alike; and while that’s all that I could ask for as an adult viewer it never sacrifices its connection with childhood and the everyday experiences of children — something that is increasingly treasurable. What better way to celebrate that than by spending a combined total of about 17 hours drawing a picture and writing an essay.
♥︎
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