Wolfwalkers

Cartoon Saloon set this in Kilkenny under Cromwell. Robyn, daughter of an English wolf hunter, meets a girl who turns into a wolf while she sleeps. The central conflict is drawn as well as written: the town is built from thick lines and angular geometry borrowed from seventeenth century woodcuts, while the forest is loose, curving and sketch-like. The most elegant touch is that Robyn's own drawing changes across the film, drifting from the town's rigid line toward the forest's flowing one as her loyalties move. The animation was done in TVPaint with construction lines deliberately left in rather than cleaned up, with the team pointing to the rough expressiveness of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. For the first-person wolfvision passages they built 3D environments in Blender and Quill, printed the frames in magenta, drew over them by hand in pencil and charcoal, then digitally removed the underlying colour. It won five Annie Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award. It closes Tomm Moore's Irish folklore trilogy. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see what hand-drawn animation can still do. Who it is not for: viewers wanting pace and gag density. This one moves slowly and behaves like a painting.