animation

Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911)

If you ever want to earn yourself some serious animation nerd cred, the next time someone asks you who your favourite animator is, fix them with a steely gaze, whisper the words “Winsor McCay”, drop the mike and then moonwalk out of the room.

I carry a mike around with me at all times for just such an eventuality.

McCay is not a household name, but he is almost certainly one of the greatest animators of all time, one of the two most influential animators of all time and most amazingly of all, possibly the first animator of all time. Okay, obviously, we will never know who was actually the first animator. Probably the first kid in class who realised that with a little doodling in the edges of your copybook you could make it look like your teacher was being eaten by velociraptors. But to start this decade by decade look at animated shorts I need a big, flashy, incandescent Big Bang and by God, McCay fits the bill.

McCay was a celebrated cartoonist probably most famous for the Little Nemo comic strip, which combined incredible detail with gorgeous, trippy surrealism.

Look at this

Inspired by the flip books that his son brought home one day, he decided to create an animated version of Little Nemo, drawing four thousand rice paper cels by hand and pioneering many animation techniques on the fly, all while carrying on with his regular comic strip work. That’s right. He virtually invented modern animation. He did it single-handedly. And he did it in his spare time. Today’s short is Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics and because it’s public domain and up on You Tube, we can all watch it together. Great, right? We never do stuff together any more.

So the movie begins before animation has been invented which is why it’s in live action (joking, joking, I know about Blackton and Cohl, I can read Wikipedia too). Winsor McKay is betting his fellow artists that he can create a comic strip that moves. And can I just point out how insanely lucrative newspapers used to be? Those tony-looking motherfuckers with their fancy suits and monocles and brandy and cigars aren’t newspaper owners, they aren’t even journalists. They are COMIC STRIP ARTISTS. That’s how much money was in the newspaper business in the nineteen tens. I mean, look at these guys! They don’t look like artists, they look like the guys who owned the fleets that hunted the blue whale to the brink of extinction! Anyway, they of course scoff and mock his idea and presumably tell him to try something more sensible like circumnavigating the globe in eighty days. This is a recurring plot in McCay’s cartoons incidentally, which could be titled Watch My Idiot Friends Lose Money by Betting Against Me, Winsor Goddamn McKcay.

Undeterred, McCay draws one of his characters, the Little Imp, to show his friends how this whole “animation” thing is going to work.

“I shall begin with racism, gentlemen, as this is 1911 after all.”
“Of course!”
“Quite right.”

One of the things you notice watching the live action scenes is that compared to a modern film the pacing is absolutely glacial. When McCay draws Little Imp, you see him draw the entire thing from start to finish, no cuts, no edits. We’re talking about a period where film is so new and exciting that even watching something as mundane as a man drawing a picture is fascinating in and of itself. You’d watch it because you most likely had never seen that before. Anyway, McCay bets his friends that he will draw 4,000 images in one month and make them move. I especially love the moment where one of McCay’s friends tries to leave and he literally pushes him back down in his chair.

“Oh, I’m sorry, is my INVENTING A NEW ARTFORM BORING YOU SIT YOUR ASS DOWN!”

We now get a sequence of delivery men bringing barrels of ink and massive slabs of paper to McCay’s office and I honestly don’t know if that’s supposed to be a joke or an accurate representation of the material that was required. McCay directs them as they bring it while wearing a fedora and smoking a cigar like a goddamn Ink Mobster. There’s some pretty unfunny business with Winsor’s son knocking over a huge pile of papers and the middle of the film drags pretty hard once you’ve gotten over the culture shock of watching people from over a century ago. But at last, McCay unveils his animation. And it is…

“No words. Should have sent a poet.”

Chuck Jones described Winsor McCay thusly, as if the first living creature to emerge on Earth was Albert Einstein, and the next was an amoeba. He’s like the Antikythera mechanism, something that should not exist as early in history as it does. He’s the first to do this, or close enough, so he doesn’t know what you’re not supposed to be able to do. He doesn’t know that you have to keep the character models simple. He doesn’t know that you’re supposed to keep the perspective unchanged and flat. When he swings the “camera” around to show an incredible, meticulously detailed dragon from the side, the front and then the rear before it slouches off into the distance he doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to be able to do that. There is no story, not really. It’s simply characters coming to life and exulting in their existence and creating new characters to play with. It’s dreamlike, and surreal, and moves with a grace and fluidity that most animators living today will never be able to match. The Titanic was being built when Winsor McCay created this, single handed. It wouldn’t be until the eve of the Second World War that Walt Disney, with a team of dozens of the most talented animators in the world and a budget of over a million dollars, would be able to create animation that rivals it. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. It breaks my goddamn heart.

Jones went on to say that the two most important names in animation were Walt Disney and Winsor McCay and that he honestly didn’t know whose name should go first. Walt himself might have bowed out of that contest. When McCay’s son visited the Disney studios in the fifties Walt gave him the tour and told him “Bob, all this should be your father’s.”

***

Unshaved Mouse has been shortlisted for best Film and TV blog at the Blog Awards Ireland 2016. Please click on the link below to vote for Mouse!

Who reviews short shorts? Mouse reviews short shorts!

So once again those cunning bastards at the Blog Awards Ireland have thwarted my plans and caught me flat footed. The shortlist has been announced (that flew in, didn’t it?) and I’m happy to announce that Unshaved Mouse has escaped the cull once more.

Here’s where I’ve been thrown all afluster. The voting actually starts today and will only run for ONE WEEK. Which, fine, it’s great that I don’t have to keep hassling you guys to vote cos honestly I hate doing that but it also means that now I have to unveil that big project I was talking about for September.

So I am hereby announcing pause for dramatic effect…

SHORTSTEMBER (now in August)!

Yeah, so while I’ve reviewed my fair share of animation on this blog it’s all been feature length animation or occasionally a TV episode or two. But some of the most important, iconic and groundbreaking work in the field was done in short subjects. Why have I never reviewed shorts before now?

Anyway every week I will be (hopefully) posting a mini review of a short animation, starting in the 1910’s and working my way forward a decade at a time until we get to the 2010’s. We’ll see how it goes, honestly, my jaw is already starting to pre-emptively ache from having bitten off more than I can chew with this one. Anyway, hope you enjoy and I’ll be posting a link so you can vote as soon as I can. First up? We’re going old school.

Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #55: Zootopia/Zootropolis

"Mr Disney? There's a Mr Chernabog here to see you?"

“Mr Disney? There’s someone here to see you?”

“What? But the world thinks I’ve been dead since the sixties, who even knows I still work here?”

“He said his name was Mr Chernabog?”

“CRAP. Tell him I can’t see him.”

“I would sir, but I’m not really here. I’m just a hallucination caused by your black-magic addled mind.”

“DISSSSSSSNEY I WOULD HAVE WORDSSSS WITH THEE.”

“Cherny! C-Train! As the world Cherns! How the fuck are you?”

“YOU HAVE BETRAYED ME, SSSSSORCEROR. AND THE LORD OF BALD MOUNTAIN KNOWSSS NOT OF MERCY.”

“Whoah! Hey! Walter Elias Disney is a man of his word, so how ’bout you settle down and tell me what this is all about?”

"WE HAD A PACT, YOU AND I. I GAVE YOU IMMORTALITY AND IN RETURN YOU AGREED TO CREATE FOR ME AN ARMY OF THE MOST DEPRAVED, HELLISH CREATURES EVER TO WALK THE EARTH."

“WE HAD A PACT, YOU AND I. I GAVE YOU IMMORTALITY AND IN RETURN YOU AGREED TO CREATE FOR ME AN ARMY OF THE MOSSSSSST DEPRAVED, HELLISSSSSH CREATURESSSS EVER TO WALK THE EARTH.”

“What? Furries?”

"I MUSSST HAVE MORE FURRRIESSS! MORE! THE CROP GROWSSS THIN! THE CROPS GROWSSSS THIN!"

“I MUSSST HAVE MORE FURRIESSS! MORE! THE CROP GROWSSS THIN! THE CROPS GROWSSSS THIN!”

"What are you talking about? We made Robin Hood!"

“What are you talking about? I made Robin Hood! That should have kept you balls deep in furries for years!”

“THAT WASSSS OVER FORTY YEARSSSSS AGO!”

“Fuck. My. Ass. Yikes, sorry. My bad. I’ll get right on that.”

“BE WARNED! IF I DO NOT RECEIVE AN ARMY OF FURRIESSSS BEYOND RECKONING I SHALL EAT…”

“Eat my soul, yeah, got it. Laurie? Get on the phone to the boys in animation and tell them we need a movie so chock full of furry bait that half the country will be yiffing by Christmas.”

“I already told you, I’m not really here!”

“Just do it woman!”

***

Some blogs might tell you that Zootopia/Zootropolis came about as part of an ongoing effort by Disney to address the more troubling and regressive aspects of their legacy and take on a pressing real world issue. But only I will tell you the truth, namely that it was part of a desperate ploy to pay off a faustian bargain made by immortal warlock Walt Disney by creating an army of furries for a demonic lord of evil. That is why, after all, the people come to Unshaved Mouse.

But first of all, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Sit down, Francine.

Namely, why the hell is this called “Zootropolis” on my side of the pond? Well, Disney haven’t actually given a reason for the name change. One possibility of course is that, as sophisticated Europeans, we would know that any utopia, even a zootopia, is impossible in an imperfect world and refuse to see the movie purely on the grounds of philosophical consistency. Also, there’s the fact that a zoo called “Zootopia” is opening in Denmark soon and maybe Disney’s lawyers didn’t want the hassle. Who can say?

Anyway, if you read this blog you’re probably aware that Disney have been on one hell of a hot streak for the last few years, producing movies that are both critically lauded and hugely successful. That in and of itself is nothing new, the Disney canon goes through peaks and troughs and this is just one peak of many. But one thing that is different this time around is that Disney is more and more comfortable making movies that actually have something relevant to say about the world. I once called Walt Disney the most apolitical American artist of the twentieth century. His movies were beautiful, funny and charming but they almost never had any kind of political message or agenda beyond the most broad “be nice, everybody” kind of sentiment. They were meant to appeal to the broadest audience possible in their own time which in practice meant that they were very conservative and very, very white.

Fast forward to today. In my review of Princess and the Frog I called the current era of the Disney canon “The Redemption Era”. Unlike the Lost Era that preceded it, where Disney was trying to definitively break with the past, new types of story, new styles, new animation techniques, the Redemption Era wears its classic influences with pride. It loves and respects the canon. But it is not blind to its flaws, either. The Redemption Era is a Beatles fan who has every album but never forgets that John Lennon beat his wife. It doesn’t simply ignore the more troubling aspects of the Disney canon but makes challenging them a core part of its identity, whether that’s doing a Restoration Era fairy tale with an all-minority main cast or a Renaissance Era musical where the princess doesn’t marry a prince at the end. Zootopia takes this to a new level. Regular commenter Kahnamanko called it the most topical and socially relevant movie Disney has made since their World War 2 propaganda shorts and I think that’s probably true. But does that make it a good movie? Does the simple fact that it’s willing to tackle such a pressing and hot-button issue as racism make it a classic that will stand the test of time? Let me answer that question with a question, do you feel a burning desire to watch any of the following movies; Brokeback Mountain, Philadelphia, Crash or Lions for Lambs? Yeah, didn’t think so. Movies that directly address the great issues of the day are often very worthy endeavours but they rarely end up being particularly beloved movies. Does Zootopia defy the odds? Let’s take a look.

***
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Space Chimps (2008)

Never pick a fight with an Australian. Lesson. Fucking. Learned.

This one hurt, folks. Space Chimps manages to encapsulate so much of what has gone wrong with 21st century animation that I almost feel like if I burned the DVD all those sins would just evaporate as the spell was lifted. It’s awful, but it’s awful in so many different ways at once that it has inestimable value as a teaching tool. I feel like you could teach an animation course on what not to do based on this movie alone. This is the first movie by Vanguard Animation that I’ve reviewed on this blog as I’ve not had the unalloyed pleasure of viewing Valiant, Happily N’Ever After or Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back….

Sorry. When I typed that last one I felt an ice-cold shudder and had to go check that all the doors and windows are locked. Anyway, Vanguard is at the rearguard of modern American animation and was founded by John H. Williams who is, as the DVD cover is quick to remind us, one of the primates who brought us Shrek. And I have one question. What the hell is Shrek? Shrek? Sounds like an Eastern European currency. Boris bought a red cabbage and a bottle of vodka for three shrek.

Highest grossing animated film of all time you say? No, doesn’t ring a bell.

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Fritz the Cat (1972)

“Heeey everyone.”

“Oh look guys, it’s Spouse of Mouse!”

“Heeey everyone. I was just hoping we could have a little chat before Mouse starts the review. Just us.”

“I know you all think it’s really funny that you got Mouse to review Fritz the Cat. I’m sure you’re all having a big laugh. “Ha” you might say, and also “Ha.”

“But here’s the thing. This movie messed him up so badly that I don’t know if he’ll ever recover. And I’m a simple mouse who lives by a simple rule: You hurt the ones I love?”

“I WILL FUCK YOUR FUCKING SHIT RIGHT THE FUCK UP. IF YOU EVER PULL ANYTHING LIKE THAT AGAIN I WILL TRACK YOU DOWN THERE IS NOWHERE YOU CAN HIDE. PAIN? I WILL MAKE YOU LONG FOR SOMETHING AS SWEET AS PAIN.”

“’Kay? Enjoy the review.”

***

Do you know what it’s like to review Fritz the Cat? To sit in the dark watching that cat fuck everything that moves, to feel your brain slowly coming apart from the constant assault of surreal, messed up, toked out, crazy shit? No. You don’t. Because you’ve never been out there, man. Out in the real deep shit. This movie man. You don’t know, man. It’s like, you think you have a handle on things, man, like life and art and truth and beauty man like they’re all just packaged and sold in these neat little Styrofoam boxes, man, and then this movie comes along and it’s like, you know man? Like, what does it all mean, man? I…I…I shouldn’t be doing this man, I should be a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas, man…

“Mouse, relax. You’re going crazy over there, man.”

“YOU WEREN’T THERE, MAN!”

Sorry. Sorry. I’m alright. Okay. Let’s do this.

For as long as there have been comics there have been “underground” comics, the kind of comics that aren’t read in a newspaper at the breakfast table on a lazy Sunday morning but are more usually read at night. Under the covers. With a flashlight.

Jerkin’ it.

Pornographic comic books or “Tijuana Bibles” were especially popular in the Great Depression and usually featured well known comic book characters or public figures engaging in what scripture calls “the hard fuckin’”. No one was safe. Popeye, Betty Boop, Superman you name it, someone drew them doin’ it.

Trust me, just be glad it’s Minnie and not Pluto.

By the 1960s the underground comics (or “comix”) scene had merged with the broader counter culture movement. In contrast to mainstream comics which had to abide by the Comics Code Authority, comix were uncensored and didn’t abide by jack shit. These books were absolutely steeped in sixties drug and music culture, often politically radical and transgressive and extreme in their depictions of sex and violence. They also, it must be said, frequently had a streak of misogyny a mile wide. But at its best, the comix scene produced some of the finest American sequential art of the twentieth century (Art Spiegelman, for example, honed his craft in indie magazines in the seventies).

The one creator who is probably more associated with the comix scene than any other is Robert Crumb and his most famous creation is almost certainly Fritz the Cat, an anthropomorphised cat who’s kinda like Felix crossed with Roosh V. The Fritz strips first appeared in the magazine Help! where the editors famously responded to his submission with a letter saying; “Dear R. Crumb, we think the little pussycat drawings you sent us were just great. Question is, how do we print them without going to jail?” The comic became a genuine breakout hit and was read by many a long-haired hippie degenerate, one of whom was our old friend Ralph Bakshi.

Bakshi had set up his own animation studio and was looking to create animation for adults. He came across one of Crumb’s books and bought the rights to the strip. Warner Bros originally were going to fund it but then they saw Bakshi’s early shoots.

Instead, the movie ended up being funded by Cinemation Industries, purveyor of such highbrow classics as The Black Godfather, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song and The Eighteen Year Old Cheerleaders.

It’s important to remember that there was a weird period from the late sixties to around the mid-eighties where porn was pretty much mainstream, and you could just go to the cinema and watch a big budget porno made and financed by a large studio as opposed to some dude with a camera and a couch. Fritz the Cat is very much a part of that. It’s not solely a porno but it’s got relatives who are pornos if you catch me. So before we get into this review please take note that this is a movie with sex and nudity, pretty grotesque ethnic caricatures, frequent homophobic and racial slurs and some generally fucked up shit.

What I’m trying to say is…

“This review ain’t NSFW for nothin’ baby.”

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Justice League: New Frontier (2008)

Comic Book historians divide the history of superhero comics into “ages”. The Golden Age lasted from the late thirties to the end of the second world war. It began with the creation of Superman and saw the births of Batman, Wonder Woman, Captains America and Marvel, the original incarnations of the Green Lantern and the Flash as well as a host of others. Owing to the ongoing unpleasantness at the time, many of these characters were patriotic, Japanazi fighting do-gooders like the greatest superhero for all time, the Original Human Torch.

“Mouse, stop showing that panel of the Original Human torch calling Hitler a liar while burning him a…”
“NEVER!”

Also, owing to the fact that this was a brand new genre and folks were still figuring out the rules these comics tended to be absolutely batshit insane.

In the forties we had a superhero who was a giant flying eyeball. How’s that for diversity?

And then, with the war over, the superhero fad died about as quickly as it had ignited and superheroes pretty much vanished from the shelves with the exception of a few stubborn holdouts like Superman.

Now, I want you to imagine that you wake up tomorrow and everyone is playing POGs. Like, POGS are suddenly huge again. Kids are playing POGs, college students are playing POGs, journalists are writing long earnest think pieces about the cultural ramifications of the POGsurgance instead of doing actual work. This weird fad from fifteen or twenty years back suddenly comes roaring to prominence again and never leaves and before you know it movie studios are making massive-budget spectacle movies with inter-connected continuity and people are lining down the street to watch Pog versus Pog: Dawn of Pog. That’s kind of what happened with the dawn of the Silver Age of comics in the late fifties/early sixties. So what happened?

“Two words. Sput! Nik!”

With the dawn of the space race, America became obsessed with science and its wild, stoner little sister science fiction. Whereas Golden Age heroes tended to have magical or mythical based powers, the new crop of superheroes belonged firmly in the realm of science fiction. Instead of getting his powers from an old magic lantern, the new Green Lantern was a space cop gifted with fabulous technology by a race of all powerful aliens. The new Flash was police scientist Barry Allen who eschewed the Roman mythology inspired look of his predecessor, Jay Garrick. Even the few surviving Golden Age heroes adapted to the times; I mean look at what poor Batman had to deal with for chrissakes:

“I AM THE NIGHT!”

Over at Marvel, the hottest new properties were Spider-man, a science student turned superhero, and the Fantastic Four, a quartet of astronauts who literally got their powers as a result of the space race.

Much like “the sixties” doesn’t simply mean the years between 1960 and 1969 but refers to an entire cultural…thing, “silver age” has come to represent a specific attitude and aesthetic in comics. The comics of this period tended to be bright, optimistic, occasionally goofy as hell and suffused with a spirit of Moon Shot era can-do. New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke’s classic 2004 love letter to that whole era, simultaneously interrogates the period in which those stories were written while simultaneously celebrating what made them great. In 2008, Cooke teamed up with his old partner Bruce Timm (Batman the Animated Series) to adapt this story as part of Warner’s line of direct to to DVD animations. Did Cooke’s work make the transition unscathed? Let’s take a look.

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Watership Down (1978)

In the 1970s Richard Adams, a British civil servant and WW2 veteran wrote down a story about rabbits he had told to his daughters. He sent it to a few publishers who rejected it before it was finally printed by a small London based publisher, became an instant international bestseller, won the Carnegie medal and allowed Adams to quit his job and work full time as a writer.

This, and I cannot stress this enough, does not usually happen.

The book’s success was so stunning that it immediately gave birth to a sub-genre of animal fantasy stories. Colin Dann’s The Animals of Farthing Wood was published a few years later and it feels like half the books I read growing up were about a group of some species of animal trying to get from point A to point B without getting run over by Toyotas. Seriously, there were Watership Down-esque books about hares, owls, squirrels, foxes, otters, even fish.

Yes. This was a real goddamn thing.

Some were good. Some were terrible. Some were about fish. But none were ever able to match the popularity of the original. Because there is only one Watership Down. Well, until Adams published the sequel in the nineties. Then there were two. Anyway, my point is; other books have fans. Watership Down has cultists. And I’m one of them. I fell in love with this book in primary school and checked it out of the school library so many times that the librarian finally said “You know what? Just keep it.”

Yeah, pretty much.

So what makes it so good? Well at the most fundamental level Adams is just a phenomenally good writer with a lovely, clear, elegant prose style that can switch between bucolic descriptions of the English countryside to a muscular blow by blow account of two rabbits kicking the hraka out of each other. Coupled with that, the personalities of the various rabbits are simple but distinct and vivid. Adams based the personalities of the main rabbits on his squad from the war back when he was a smouldering, sensitive young officer with dark unfathomable eyes and a soft voice that could win the heart of any army nurse who crossed his path.

“Jerry’s an alright sort. He’s just being lead by a bad egg.”

But the most important trick of any fantasy novel is to bring you into its world. It’s why Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are so beloved, because the amount of detail and thought that has gone into crafting Westeros and Middle Earth makes reading the books almost like taking a holiday in a foreign country, albeit one filled with rampaging orcs (so, like Lanzarote).

This is the real genius of Watership Down. Adams gives his rabbits a language and a mythology and threads details of it throughout the larger narrative. And while they have been anthropomorphized to an extent, they’re still very much rabbits. They behave and react like wild animals, and they have difficulty understanding sophisticated concepts like art or, say, numbers higher than four.

Today’s movie was released in 1978, a mere six years after the book was published. And given the length of time it takes to get an independently financed feature length animation off the ground we can probably take it that the movie was in the works almost as soon as the ink was dry on the first print run. The film is now regarded as a classic of British animation and Total Film named it as one of their greatest British films of all time. But it’s also been at the centre of controversy ever since the British censorship board rated it “U” or suitable for all ages, a decision that they are still getting complaints about almost forty years later. And loathe as I am to side with the Helen Lovejoys of the world, yeah. No way in Inlé should this have gotten a U rating.

Yes. “Mild” violence. If you’re a fucking DROOG.

But is the movie really as good as all that? Let’s take a look. Spoiler warnings for both the movie and book ahead.

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Song of the Sea (2014)

Pff. Women, amirite? One day you’re walking down the beach and you see a beautiful woman walking out of the sea, you hit it off, you get married, have a couple of kids and then BAM! Turns out she’s a seal and she’s off gallivanting with her seal buddies without even leaving a forwarding address for child support. Ain’t it always the way? Well, maybe not where you come from but in Ireland it’s practically an epidemic. The canon is full of selkie stories. Shit, if I had my druthers, every Irish exchange of marriage vows would include the sentence “And by the way, I am totally not a seal.”

Selkie stories are not exclusively Irish, of course. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to call them a Scottish tradition but you also find Selkie tales in the Faroe Islands and Iceland and despite the basic similarities (seal turns into a woman, marries a human) they run the gamut from tragic romances to horror stories. A common feature is that the Selkie has a seal-skin cloak, without which she can’t turn into a seal again. The fisherman hides the cloak from her for years, until one day their children are searching around in the attic, find the cloak and show it to her, at which point the Selkie’s all “Laters!” and makes her escape. A particularly grim version from the Faroese Island of Kalsoy has the Selkie return to her seal family, only for her human abductor to kill her husband and children in revenge. The Selkie then swears to basically kill every dude from his village until there are enough bodies to circle the entire island which she is still doing to this day. Then there are other stories where the marriage between the fisherman and Selkie is loving and consensual, but she has to to turn into a seal to save him from drowning and so can never return to live on land. The universal theme running through these stories is loss. Happiness is transient, loss is forever. Sounds like a fun cartoon to me!

To follow up the phenomenal success of Secret of Kells, director Tomm Moore basically created Song of the Sea, an to homage selkie stories and to his own childhood growing up in Ireland in the eighties. I also grew up in Ireland in the eighties, but I remember it being distinctly less magical.

“Well, apart from the whole “being transformed into a mouse” thing.”

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The Secret of Kells (2009)

Guys, I’ll be honest. I haven’t been this daunted by a review since Frozen. First you have the fact that this is an absolutely adored film with a lot of fans amongst readers of this very blog, and then you have the fact that the movie is Irish (well, an Irish-Franco-Belgian co-production) and the fact that I’m Irish (well, an Irish-Greek co-production) and that people seem to think that gives me some kind of special insight into this movie. I mean what are you expecting, that I’m just going to emerge from my turf cottage and impart some ancient Gaelic wisdom through the haze of my clay pipe?

“Yes, now quit stalling.”

Okay, okay. Special insight. Special insight. Let me see. Okay. You know that episode of the Simpsons where they’re crossing from the American embassy into Australia and Homer’s all “Look boy! Now I’m in America! Now I’m in Australia! America! Australia!” and so on and so forth? Imagine an entire culture built around that joke and you have the Irish. We’re obsessed with borders. OBSESSED. The places in space and time where one thing ends and another starts. Ask an American when summer begins and they’ll say “Ohhhh, round about Memorial day, I guess?”. Ask an Irish person when summer begins and they’ll say “01 May. Midnight. Greenwich Mean time. And not a second before.” Borders are where things get weird, where things aren’t one thing or another. Why is Halloween so creepy? Because Samhain occurs on October 31^st, right when Autumn ends and Winter begins on the Gaelic calendar. It’s at times like that when the…things in the other world can cross into ours. This fear and fascination with borders runs bone deep in the Irish psyche and ties into our historic relationship with the fairy realm. My wife is a dyed in the wool atheist, but she would not enter a fairy ring if you paid her. You just don’t do that.

“IT’S COMMON SENSE PEOPLE!”

Secret of Kells is a very Irish movie, and I don’t just mean because it draws so heavily on Irish mythology, art and history and features some of the greatest Irish actors to have been claimed as British by the English media at some point. It’s obessed with lines drawn between over here and over there, between light and dark, between faith and fear and between civilization and the wild wood.

It is also feckin’ smurges.

So. Background. Secret of Kells is the product of Cartoon Saloon, which began as a loose animator’s collective in 1999 and has now produced four full length animated features, two of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. Despite this incredibly small filmography, Cartoon Saloon is already considered to be on a par with Studio Ghibli. Clearly, Irish Animation has come a long way since Daithí Lacha.

HE WAS TERRIBLE.

But is the praise justified? Yes. Is the movie as good as YES. Does it YES. Whatever hypothetical question I could ask the answer is almost definitely YES.

Let’s take a look.

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If I said I was happy, I’d be lion.

“Disney?”

“Um…yeah?”

“Are you tarnishing the legacy of one of your beloved classics again? I thought we were past this.”

“I’m not! I swear!”

“Then what, pray tell, is this the fuck?”

“Oh it’s an exciting new chapter in the Lion King mythos!”

“You have ten seconds to explain yourself, sir.”

“Okay, see it stars Kion, Simba and Nala’s son, as he forms the Lion Guard, an elite group of animals whose sworn duty it is to protect the Pride Lands from danger.”

“Okay. That actually sounds like a pretty decent premise if handled well…”

“See, Scar used to have superpowers…”

“WOW. Ok. Stop right there. Pull this bus over…”

“See, Scar had the magical Roar of the Elders and led the Lion Guard…”

“Scar? “Shallow end of the gene pool” Scar?”

“And when he tried to get the Lion Guard to turn against Mufasa and they refused he used the roar to destroy them.”

“No. No. That never happened. You lying media conglomerate.”

“But then because he used the roar for evil he lost it.”

“So why didn’t he just use it against Mufasa in the first…no, you know what I’m not even going to engage with the idea. So tell me, does this travesty ignore Simba’s Pride or take place in the same continuity?”

“Neither! It canonises some aspects while blatantly contradicting others!”

“Ah! So everybody’s angry!”

“Yeah!”

“WHAT ARE YOU ON?”

“Everything…everything…so much…I…I can see God…”

“Disney you’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to stop this now. You’ve got to pull every episode and pretend this never happened. When people ask, tell them it was a hoax by Dreamworks. Tell them that the perpetrators will be caught and justice will be swift.”

“But I haven’t told you the best part!”

“Down we go, down and down.”