Wolfwalkers - Irish folklore, myths, wolves and movies

"Wolfwalkers tells the story of 11-year-old Robyn Goodfellow, a young apprentice hunter who comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack of wolves. Her life changes though after she saves a native girl, Mebh, which leads to her discovery of the Wolfwalkers and transforms her into the very thing her father is tasked to destroy."

This beautiful new movie comes to us from Tomm Moore, who also brought us the amazing 'Secret of Kells' and 'Song of The Sea' - which is one of my all time favourite movies.

His visual style is noticeable straight away in this concept trailer and definitely connects it to his two previous films. 

The hand-drawn look of the movie is very important, as different techniques have been used to express different moods and to show the difference between characters. For example, army members are drawn in a woodblock style, while the wolfwalkers and animals and drawn in a freer, more expressive way.

“When we see the world from the point of view the wolves, it’s animated in charcoal with a very limited palette and color only where there are scents. In contrast to the block print style in Kilkenny we have a much looser look to the forest — lots of ink splats and loose watercolors and scribbly pencil lines.”

The animation takes inspiration from traditional block print artwork and is set in Ireland in the 1600's during the civil war. This was a time when religion was fierce and wolves were seen as demonic - leading to lots of folklore and myths surrounding them.

Wolves feature prominantly in lots of Irish folklore, so it's nice to see them coming to our screens now too.
One traditional Celtic tale tells of a group of people who have been cursed to turn into wolves every seven years, and must wait seven more before turning back into humans again. There are many more wolf transformation stories related to Irish folklore and myth too.

This movie is full of Irish folklore and history and is set in the same area as the base of the animation house creating it; keeping it very local and authentic!

If you absolutely loved 'Song of The Sea' (like I did), then this is definately one to watch out for!

And if you haven't seen Tomm Moore's other movies yet (WHY NOT?!), then be sure to check them out before this future gem comes out!
They're magical, steeped in folklore and myth, and completely beautful too! 

Oz The (not so) Great & Powerful.

After watching this trailer for the new Oz film I was beyond excited when I went to see it on my Birthday - it looked so exciting, colourful and completely rammed full of magic and adventure! However, it was not at all what I expected.

I went into the cinema with such high hopes and was fully ready to be blown away by the story and visuals to come, but when the movie started I found it to be painfully slow and badly acted. As the beginning of the movie is made to look like an old fashioned film I thought that perhaps the bad acting and slowness was also intentional - to further mirror the old films it was based on - so I remained positive that things would improve once we travelled to the wonderful land of Oz. However, again I was sadly disappointed.

Yes, some of the visuals in the movie are quite nice, but its nothing we haven't seen before. In fact, the landscape of Oz reminded me so much of Tim Burtons 'Alice In Wonderland' that it completely pulled me out of the film. Many of the scenes in 'Oz' are so obviously green/blue-screened that it makes the whole movie look cheap and laughable - the scene where Oz and Glinda are travelling inside bubbles is one very good example of this. I'm hoping that the effects look better on a smaller screen, but on the big cinema screen things just looked far too fake for me. I never truly felt like Oz was a real place in which these characters were adventuring and therefore, couldn't fully immerse myself in the story.

Sadly, the acting remained very wooden throughout the movie and I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters, with the exception of the china doll (who really was the best part of the whole movie). The character of Oz himself was extremely sleazy and grating, and I certainly didn't grow to like him more as the story progressed, which I guess should have been the case.

I wanted so badly to like this movie, and it had so much wonderful potential, but unfortunately I just couldn't see past its many, many flaws. It seems that film-makers seem to have such trouble with converting fairy tales into films and I'm crossing my fingers so hard that the upcoming Jack The Giant Slayer movie is one that does it right! I'll keep you posted.

(These are my own views and opinions, please don't let them put you off going to see this movie. Who knows, you may absolutely love it and completely disagree with me. Let me know if/what you did like about it - I'd love to have my eyes opened to some good in it.)