The only reason I picked up a subscription for Apple TV+ is because of a good deal it had with two other streaming services, CBS and Showtime, that I otherwise would have probably ignored. And, for that subscription, Apple TV has given me, well, maybe one Tom Hanks movie and that’s about it. The various other TV shows and such on there hasn’t really grabbed my attention, and I actually have gotten some use out of CBS and Showtime in the meantime.
But then I saw the animated Wolfwalkers on a list of big movies coming out late in the calendar year. It certainly looked interesting, so here we are.
It’s 1650 in rural Ireland, and a community is being overrun by wolves from the forest. Young girl Robin (voice of Honor Kneafey) comes over from England with her hunter father Bill (Sean Bean). Bill has been tasked with eliminating the wolves so the Lord Protector can continue to expand his uptight Christian idea of civilization into the Irish countryside. Robin, with her pet falcon Merlin, wants nothing more than to join her father in the woods, but the Lord Protector wants her to work in the scullery. She doesn’t stay there, and instead encounters Mebh (Eva Whittaker), a wild girl who is apparently a wolfwalker, a pagan-inclined girl who, like her mother, possesses some magic abilities and an affinity for wolves.
Robin and Mebh bond a bit, and it turns out being a wolfwalker may be a little…contagious? Yeah, contagious is a good word for it.
This was a rather delightful movie. The animation style was expressive and colorful. Given how prominent CG animation is these days, it’s always nice to see a well-drawn traditional animated feature. There’s a very obvious contrast between the English settlement and the Irish forest. Mebh and her mother are big-haired, colorful women with leaves and flowers in their hair and big expressive eyes. The Lord Protector and his men are more angular and monochrome, drawn in a manner any American will recognize as something akin to the Mayflower pilgrims. The Irish peasants seem to straddle the difference, looking half-wild but still a bit cowed. The one exception among the adults would be Robin’s father, a man who truly loves his daughter and finds himself stuck between being a good parent and whatever his duty to the Lord Protector might be. There aren’t any bad voice performances, but Bean’s warmth as Bill shines through in his every line.
If anything, his closest rival to that parental warmth comes from Maria Doyle Kennedy as Mebh’s mother Mol, but Mol doesn’t get many lines for a very good narrative reason.
Should we be surprised the antagonists in a movie about Irish folklore are the English? Particularly Oliver Cromwell? Not really. But this was still a fun movie, with some really creative animation, particularly given the reason wolfwalkers are called, well, that while demonstrating the power of parental love and childhood innocence to do the right thing against people who believe the only true path is total conformity to someone else’s standards. Given some of the movies I’ve seen so far this past weekend, Wolfwalkers is looking to be one of the better ones.
Grade: A-
0 Comments