INTERVIEW: In this animated film, ‘Wolfwalkers’ roam ancient Ireland
Image: Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart are co-directors of Wolfwalkers, a movie about the last wolf pack in Ireland. Image courtesy of GKIDS / Provided by official site with permission.
There are many qualities that are surprising about the stunningly beautiful animated film Wolfwalkers, currently in movie theaters and ready to stream on AppleTV+ starting Friday, Dec. 11. For starters, co-directors Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, who also created The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, have breathed life into the film with actual hand-drawn animation, which is saying something in this CGI-heavy world populated by Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks.
The screenplay, written by Will Collins, surrounds Robyn Goodfellowe, an apprentice hunter who heads to Ireland to kill the island’s last wolf pack. While in the country, she meets Mebh, a free-spirited girl who teaches Robyn about the “wolfwalkers,” a magical tribe that are humans by day, but wolves by night. With this new perspective, Robyn may change her hunting ways and let the final wolf pack survive.
“We just sat down at lunch in the middle of a story workshop, and we just started writing out things that we were engaged in and passionate about and invested in, like things that inspired us like environmentalism, animal rights, empathy toward the other,” Stewart said about the genesis of the film, which stretches back seven years. “And then we kind of wanted to make it a uniquely Old World / Irish folk story so that it would fit with Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells, and Tomm remembered this folk tale that he had heard as a teenager called ‘The Wolf People of Ossory,’ which was about people that would turn into wolves when they slept.”
Stewart thought this wolf story sounded like the perfect fit for a cinematic adaptation. It was kind of an alternative to the werewolf story. The people didn’t become monsters; they became wolves. Eventually the idea materialized of a hunter becoming one of these wolves and seeing the world essentially as the prey.
“So it was amazing how all those little jigsaw pieces fell into place on that first day, so we knew we had the roots of a good story there,” Stewart said. “And over the course of years working with Will Collins, our scriptwriter, it went off in all kinds of different directions, but we still knew that we had the good core of the story.”
Moore appreciates how Wolfwalkers works on many levels. When viewers catch a screening in a movie theater or when they stream the movie on AppleTV+, no doubt there will be different levels of interpretation.
“It can grow with kids,” Moore said. “I loved E.T. I remember rewatching it as a young father because I wanted to introduce my son to it. I’m like, this is a movie about divorce. I didn’t even know it was a movie about divorce. This alien is taking the place in this kid’s life for his dad who has disappeared. His big brother isn’t being kind to him. I was like, this is so interesting, so I think the best kids movies work on several levels. You can revisit them. It’s what makes them a bit more timeless.”
Stewart pointed to the comedic brilliance of The Simpsons as another example. Children can laugh at Homer’s antics, while their parents can appreciate the social commentary of the residents of Springfield. There’s a similar setup for Wolfwalkers, which has deep messaging about environmentalism and humans connections to animals, but it can also be taken as a good animal story.
And that hand-drawn animation is captivating and pulls in the audience, no matter their age, to the narrative.
“It was something that we’ve been building on,” Moore said of the animation style. “It was a manifesto that went back to the first film, Secret of Kells. Ross was art director on that, and when we were first were making that, we were kind of making a statement that there was still more to be done with hand-drawn, that CGI animation and that rush toward being perfect and realistic, we could see even then was kind of an artistic dead end. So we’ve been trying to push hand-drawn animation in different directions since the very beginning. This was just an opportunity to try out a lot of stuff that we’ve been talking about over the years and really go for it.”
Stewart appreciated how the crew members on Wolfwalkers were immensely talented as artists themselves. He believes that everyone on that set had an artistic background in a different niche, and this made for a creative filmmaking process.
“Nearly everyone who worked on Wolfwalkers had an art form that they would do in their spare time, whether it was illustration or painting or printmaking,” Stewart said. “I think now we have to realize that to get all those people involved and passionate about a project, they should be able to bring some of their art form into the project, too, so, for example, the town has a printmaking aesthetic to emulate the 16-century woodcut prints. And we worked with a scene illustrator … who is a printmaker herself and does woodcuts, so she knew exactly how to replicate the woodcut aesthetic and develop a process. She was really passionate about it.”
For the animation team to achieve the wolf aesthetic, Moore headed to a tucked-away place to see actual wolves. “I visited a park early in the production in Canada,” Moore said. “I went to a music festival in Canada, and I deliberately drove out of my way in Alberta to get to a wolf sanctuary. And when I arrived they all had just been fed, so I drew lots of wolves like this [gnashing teeth and laughing].”
Plus, there were some canine helpers in the studio: dogs were on set, helping to inspire the animation style and also provide companionship.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Wolfwalkers, directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, is now playing in movie theaters and will be available to stream on AppleTV+ starting Friday, Dec. 11. Click here for more information.
