Tomm Moore’s first film draws the making of the Book of Kells in the style of the book itself. It is a pleasure to look at, the story is slight and the ending rushed, and we would hand it to any child with a pencil.
The Book of Kells is a ninth-century manuscript of the Gospels, its pages so thick with spirals, knotwork and interlaced animals that it is hard to believe human hands made it. Tomm Moore’s first film asks how they did, and answers with a boy. Brendan (Evan McGuire) lives inside the walls of the Abbey of Kells under his uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), who has given up on books and set every monk to building a wall against the Northmen. Then Aidan (Mick Lally) walks in from Iona carrying a white cat and an unfinished book, and Brendan finds he would rather draw than dig. It is a good film, a lovely one to look at, and its story is a good deal thinner than its pages.
Moore draws it the way the monks drew. There is almost no perspective: the abbey sits flat on the screen like a diagram, the wall is a curve of grey stone, and the forest is a screen of green through which everything is seen at once. When Brendan first steps outside the gate the trees fill the frame with circles inside circles, and Aisling (Christen Mooney), a pale girl with white hair, appears between them as though she had been there all along and we had failed to notice. Faces are ovals and triangles. The frame keeps splitting into three panels, so a conversation looks like a page with its margins. We have seen a great many animated forests, and this is one of the few we would know from a single frame.
The Northmen frightened us, and we are a good deal older than the audience the PG is for. Moore draws them as black shapes with horns and red slits for eyes, no faces, no speech beyond a grunt, moving in a mass like ink spilled across the page. Their first appearance is a shadow on a hill. Children of seven or eight will manage; younger ones may not, and there is a sequence in a cave, later, that we will not describe except to say that the film’s own warnings about the place should be heeded.
Bruno Coulais scores it with the Irish group Kila, and the two do not always sound like the same film, which is a compliment. The abbey gets choirs and low strings, the forest gets pipes and a fiddle, and the join is where Brendan stands. Aisling has a song she sings to the cat, a thin high tune over almost nothing, and Mooney’s voice is unpolished in the right way. Gleeson plays Cellach as a man who is not wrong about the Northmen and is wrong about everything else, and never lets him become a mere obstacle. Lally, warm and rasping, gives Aidan the calm of a man who has already lost one home to the raiders and does not intend to lose the book.
The script, by Fabrice Ziolkowski, is where the film runs short. Cellach’s quarrel with Aidan, walls or pages, is a good one and it is stated in full within twenty minutes; after that the film restates it rather than testing it. Brendan’s own change, from a boy who obeys to a boy who draws, happens mostly because the plot needs it to. The other monks, Brother Tang (Liam Hourican), Brother Assoua (Paul Tylak) and Brother Square (Paul Young), are a chorus with one joke each. And at 79 minutes the last quarter arrives in a rush. Fabienne Alvarez-Giro’s editing, patient in the forest, starts hurrying once the Northmen reach the gate, and events that ought to land with weight go by in a couple of cuts. Most critics have not minded; we did, a little.
Set against the animation of its moment, which was mostly computer-rendered and mostly loud, the film stands out by being drawn, and drawn from a source nobody else had thought to use. The debt to Miyazaki is open: Aisling running with the wolves owes something to Princess Mononoke, and Moore does not hide it. What he adds is the manuscript, and the idea that a cartoon and an illuminated page are the same thing done twelve centuries apart. That idea carries the film further than its plot does.
Show it to a child who likes to draw, and sit with them for the cave. Then find a reproduction of the real book, and watch them notice.
