Wolfwalk­ers – first-look review

The colo­nial­ist idea that land is meant to be tamed and con­trolled has a long his­to­ry, one that con­tin­ues to haunt us to this day. For this very rea­son Wolfwalk­ers, the lat­est from the acclaimed Irish ani­ma­tion stu­dio Car­toon Saloon, feels urgent and con­tem­po­rary despite its medieval context.

The set-up is an enthralling com­bi­na­tion of children’s folk­tale and an empow­er­ing rewrite of Irish his­to­ry. Set in Kilken­ny (where Car­toon Saloon itself is based) dur­ing the Cromwellian con­quest of Ire­land, the film sees the occu­py­ing Eng­lish forces seek to wipe out the wolves in the sur­round­ing for­est so to bet­ter enable their defor­esta­tion. This is com­pli­cat­ed dif­fi­cult by the rumoured pres­ence of wolfwalk­ers, humans with the pow­er to leave their bod­ies in their sleep, and become wolves themselves.

The divide between the ​‘civilised’ and the nat­ur­al is embod­ied in the film’s very con­struc­tion, with its con­trast of swirling forests that seem to emu­late tra­di­tion­al Celtic spi­rals with the more rigid town, more geo­met­ric in its make­up and built to resem­ble a cage when viewed from far away. The inten­tion­al flat­ness of the town is even more strik­ing when pre­sent­ed against the depth of the film’s utter­ly gor­geous ​‘wolf vision’, which melts away the colour of the city for its own con­trast of grey back­ground and mul­ti-coloured lights resem­bling smells and sounds.

This delib­er­ate­ly con­trast­ing style comes down to the char­ac­ters as well: the inhab­i­tants of the city (or ​“town­ies” as Maebh calls them) are drawn with sharp­er lines and angles; the wolves and the wolfwalk­ers with sketch­i­er and more free-flow­ing line work. The art direc­tion and char­ac­ter design is aston­ish­ing, pulling not just from the inter­lock­ing spi­rals and nat­ur­al pat­terns of Celtic art but also the flat art of tapes­tries and wood­block print, Moore and Stew­art deft­ly and often exper­i­men­tal­ly draw­ing on var­i­ous art styles beyond those of Irish his­to­ry and West­ern animation.

Chief among those inspi­ra­tions, as with Song of the Sea before it, might be the work of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. The inten­tion­al­ly rough pen­cilling recall that of Taka­ha­ta Isao’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya, while its nar­ra­tive might recall Princess Mononoke for some, with its tale of lupine resis­tance to impe­r­i­al forces lev­el­ling forests in a quest to exert con­trol over nature. While the com­par­i­son of their work to that of the Japan­ese stu­dio is prob­a­bly a lit­tle worn out by now, Wolfwalk­ers is know­ing­ly evok­ing these works in the most impor­tant, invig­o­rat­ing ways.

In the same man­ner as those films, Wolfwalk­ers is embed­ded in the per­spec­tives of its chil­dren – the shel­tered daugh­ter of an Eng­lish hunter Robyn and the wolf walk­er Maebh – who are the ones who see moral­i­ty most clear­ly, as the adults of the world are blind­ed by ambi­tion and tenets of feal­ty to their masters.

Like­wise, Moore and Stew­art trust in the emo­tion­al intel­li­gence of chil­dren to process what turns out to be a pret­ty bleak sec­ond act as Cromwell’s tyran­ni­cal quest to tame the for­est gets increas­ing­ly severe, with the real threat of stock­ades and death looms over Robyn and her father.

Of course, it’s also a play­ful and joy­ous cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence; the threads that Moore and Stew­art and screen­writer Will Collins weave togeth­er feel noth­ing short of mag­i­cal. As a whole the revi­sion­ist his­to­ry of Wolfwalk­ers is rous­ing, empow­er­ing in its belief in the need to fight for the envi­ron­ment, and belief in the capa­bil­i­ty of the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion to do so.