Cartoon Saloon: Animation as Illumination

Why write about animation on an early music blog?

Cartoon Saloon is up to precisely the same trick as medieval manuscript illuminators: while the main text plods on, the real life, wit and subversion are cavorting in the margins. Oh, see A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting.

I’ve always loved animation, though not the reassuring, brightly merchandised sort designed to keep children docile while adults check their phones. No. I’ve been consistently drawn to the murkier outskirts: The Secret of NIMH (1982), the unaccountably traumatising 1978 Watership Down, the 1981 Heavy Metal...

And then there's Disney's odd compulsion to remake itself. Not the corporate reboots, but the studio's pattern of returning to the same emotional territory across decades. Lilo and Stitch (2002) operates as a thematic and aesthetic remake of Dumbo (1941), transposing the earlier film's core narrative into a contemporary Hawaiian setting while deliberately echoing its visual approach.

Both films hinge on a familiar Disney predicament: a misfit who upsets the family applecart. In Dumbo, the young elephant's oversized ears make him an object of ridicule in the circus, while his mother Mrs. Jumbo is imprisoned after defending him from cruel spectators. Similarly, in Lilo and Stitch, the genetically-engineered alien Stitch arrives as a disruptive force in an already fragile family, where young Lilo and her sister Nani struggle to stay together under the scrutiny of social services following their parents' death.

Director Chris Sanders deliberately chose to render Lilo and Stitch using watercolour backgrounds (the same technique employed in Dumbo) thereby crafting a visual bridge to Disney’s golden age while signalling the film's debt to its predecessor.

The character arcs follow remarkably parallel trajectories, with both protagonists transforming from figures of shame into sources of salvation through the power of acceptance and belonging. Dumbo's perceived deformity becomes his greatest asset when he learns to fly, saving the circus and reuniting with his mother, while Stitch (designed as an indestructible weapon programmed only for destruction) learns the meaning of 'ohana through Lilo's unwavering acceptance, ultimately using his dangerous abilities to protect rather than destroy.

Both films feature a small, loyal companion who believes in the protagonist before anyone else does (Timothy Mouse for Dumbo, and Lilo for Stitch) in their diminutive glory. demonstrate how a relationship built on acceptance can fundamentally reshape an individual's identity.

Where computer animation offers precision and control, watercolour celebrates organic beauty and hand-touched immediacy, suggesting that the most meaningful individuals and families need not conform to predetermined standards. The emotional power of both films derives from their willingness to depict real pain rendered in soft, vulnerable brushstrokes before earning their uplifting conclusions. In remaking Dumbo's essential story for a new generation, Lilo and Stitch preserves the original's emotional core while expanding its definition of family beyond biological bonds, proving that both stories and visual techniques.

It was mildly dispiriting, then, though hardly surprising, to watch Wolfwalkers lose the Academy Award to Soul. Not that there's anything actively wrong with Soul. It is tasteful, competent, and reassuringly approved by committees, but Wolfwalkers is infinitely more beautiful as animation, and infinitely odder in what it's prepared to risk.

So let's talk about Cartoon Saloon, and why they matter to anyone interested in how medieval imagination survives into the present.

This isn't going to be a comprehensive analysis. It can’t be. There is simply too much going on in The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, The Breadwinner, Wolfwalkers, My Father’s Dragon (and yes, before anyone writes in, I am aware that Puffin Rock exists; I wrote this before it appeared) to be responsibly unpacked in a single post.

Because Cartoon Saloon isn't just making films about folklore, they're working in the same liminal spaces, the same category-crisis zones, the same margins-as-method that medieval illuminators inhabited. Their films are (sometimes obviously) manuscript pages come to life, complete with monsters, shapeshifters, and the persistent refusal to stay neatly categorised.

The Deliberate Flatness

Cartoon Saloon's work occupies a peculiar space in contemporary animation: rooted in specific cultural traditions. Their design takes cues from Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler (1993) in its use of flattened perspective, which was itself inspired by Persian miniatures. This lineage matters. It speaks to a deliberate rejection of the three-dimensional realism that has dominated Western animation since Disney's Snow White.

Instead, Cartoon Saloon looks backwards, finding inspiration in illuminated manuscripts, woodcut prints, and the decorative arts of cultures that never prioritised perspective. 

This is the medieval illuminator's approach: the page as sacred space, pattern as meaning, flatness as more than limitation. When you're depicting the intersection of worlds (human and divine, civilised and wild, living and dead) realism is a hindrance. You need a visual language that can hold contradictions, and show a character existing in multiple states simultaneously.

This rejection of three-dimensional realism isn't mere aesthetic preference. It's epistemological. As the Korean media scholar Seo Soo-Jung argues, animation that privileges pattern over perspective is 'illustrating spiritual truths, not physical ones'.

But flatness enables something else, too: what animation theorists call 'condensation', the maximum degree of suggestion in the minimum of imagery. Cartoon Saloon's two-dimensional approach isn't about doing less. It's about suggesting more through pattern, symbol, and association rather than realistic depth. The flat page becomes what experimental animator Len Lye called 'the bodily stuff', the most direct vehicle for expressing felt experience, for translating the interior states of consciousness into visible form.

Wolfwalkers

The Rochester Bestiary

Wolfwalkers was the least immediately captivating to me of all the films. Perhaps the aesthetic felt busier than the previous three. Yet it repays closer attention, particularly in how it plays with perspective and point of view as manifestations of categorical instability.

Set in Kilkenny (the town the studio calls home) the film is about integrity, being true to who you are, celebrating difference. But it's also about shapeshifting as resistance, about transformation as the refusal to accept imposed categories.

The bird, Merlyn, might be presumed to be a merlin (Falco columbarius), incidentally of no relation to the wizard of Arthurian mythology. Wizard Merlin's name comes from the Welsh Myrddin, Latinised by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae (twelfth century) to 'Merlinus' whilst avoiding 'Merdinus' and the unfortunate resemblance to the French word merde ('excrement'). Merlin-the-bird comes from the French esmerillon. A small thing, perhaps, but indicative of the care Cartoon Saloon takes with naming and reference, and with acknowledging that categories are constructed, that names carry histories, that nothing is quite what it first appears.

The Xerox Aesthetic

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) pioneered a sketchy, expressive line art style made possible by Xerox technology. This allowed animators' original drawings (complete with rough pencil lines) to be transferred directly onto the screen rather than being cleaned up and inked. Wolfwalkers intentionally emulates this aesthetic. Directors Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart wanted the animation to retain the feel of hand-drawn pencil lines, with visible construction lines and layered textures.

Both films embrace stylisation over realism. Wolfwalkers takes this further with flat, woodcut-inspired visuals, especially in the forest scenes, and multiple artistic styles to represent different points of view: the humans versus the wolfwalkers.

The film plays more with perspective than Secret of Kells or Song of the Sea, particularly as it explores the wolves' experience of the world. Wolves navigate by smell rather than sight. The screen becomes a riot of colour and scent-trails, a synaesthetic rendering of animal consciousness. When Robyn transforms, the visual language transforms with her. The world literally looks different. Smells different. Is different.

This is shapeshifting as epistemological crisis. Not just a change in form, but a change in how reality is perceived and structured. The film refuses to privilege human perspective as default. Instead, it shows us that what we call 'the world' is actually multiple worlds, overlapping, accessible through transformation.

What Wolfwalkers achieves here is one of animation's distinctive capacities: what theorists call 'penetration', the visualisation of unimaginable psychological, organic, and perceptual interiors. Animation can seemingly control all aspects of temporal order and spatial configuration. It offers, as Paul Wells notes, 'a vehicle for visualisation that was inherently metaphorical and metaphysical.' The scent-trails show us that transformation means not merely changing what you are, but changing how you experience what is.

A short detour

When Oliver Cromwell launched his military campaign in Ireland in 1649, the Irish landscape was still home to a thriving grey wolf (Canis lupus) population. These predators roamed the forests and mountains, a natural part of the countryside that had existed for centuries.

Cromwell himself played an unexpected role in their eventual extinction. During his campaign to subdue Ireland, he actively encouraged wolf hunting as part of broader efforts to 'tame' the Irish wilderness. His administration offered bounties for wolf kills, and the exportation of Irish wolfhounds (bred specifically for hunting these animals) became a significant trade.

This pattern of bounty systems for wolf elimination was common across Europe during this period. Similar financial rewards were offered in France, Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries from the fourteenth century onward. These organised extermination campaigns reflected a continent-wide effort to rid populated areas of what were considered dangerous predators.

The systematic persecution of wolves continued long after Cromwell's death in 1658. Through the late seventeenth century, their numbers declined sharply due to relentless hunting, habitat destruction, and deliberate extermination policies. What had once been a common sight became increasingly rare.

By 1786, the last known wolf in Ireland was killed in County Carlow, though some accounts suggest small populations may have survived in remote mountainous regions until the early 1800s. The wolf that had once symbolised the wild Irish landscape was gone forever, a victim of human expansion and the colonial policies that Cromwell had helped set in motion over a century before.

Shapeshifters and Irish Mythology

Wolfwalkers doesn't rely on classic werewolf tropes. Instead of following the horror-oriented path of werewolf mythology (cursed transformations, full moon triggers, loss of control) the film reinterprets the concept with a gentler, more mystical lens. But it's not gentle in its implications.

Which raises the question: what exactly are the 'classic werewolf tropes'? Because the werewolf, a shapeshifter by nature, is potentially even more mutable than the vampire and yet has received far less consideration, despite a folkloric and cinematic history as rich as Dracula's. The werewolf is not one thing. It's many werewolves, each speaking to the particular anxieties and desires of its cultural moment.

The concept goes back far further than most realise. A strong bet for the earliest recorded reference is the Epic of Gilgamesh (like, 2100 BCE), where the goddess Ishtar transforms a shepherd into a wolf as punishment. Ovid's Metamorphoses has Zeus turning King Lycaon into a wolf for trying to trick him into eating human entrails, the origin of 'lycanthropy' from the Greek lykos (wolf). Throughout all epochs and cultures, stories abound of humans turning into terrifying carnivores as the result of supernatural curse.

But they weren't always treated as far-fetched fables. Even Saint Augustine took the belief seriously enough to note in City of God: 'it is generally believed that, by certain witches' spells, men may be turned into wolves.'

Early Christian authorities attributed shape-shifting to witchcraft and condemned both belief and practice as abominations. Despite their best efforts, belief in lycanthropy proliferated throughout medieval Europe.

The word 'werewolf' derives from Old English werwulf (man-wolf), prosaic enough to be warned against in King Cnut's law codes. Gervase of Tilbury, writing in the thirteenth century, claims: 'in England we have often seen men change into wolves.'

The Norse tradition offers something different: the Völsunga Saga features a father and son who don wolfskins and take on all the physical attributes of wolves: these are the ulfhéðnar, 'wolf-coats,' warrior-guardians who channel animal spirits to enhance battle effectiveness. Neil Price warns against forming too fixed an idea of what they really were; the donning of skins in archaeological artefacts like the Torslunda helmet plates may have served ritualistic functions, but in the Norse worldview, ritual, warfare and religion blend into one. Boundaries we take for granted are there to be crossed, or else do not exist at all. Hence the fluidity between human and animal forms so prevalent in Norse storytelling.

This is the older European tradition: transformation as capacity, as chosen spiritual practice, as warrior identity. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries darkened this considerably. France and Germany saw spates of alleged werewolf cases. Gilles Garnier was burned at the stake in 1573. Stubbe Peter was executed near Cologne in 1589 for cannibalism and multiple murders, claiming he had a belt that allowed him to become a werewolf. Jean Grenier in 1603 claimed responsibility for murders, saying he had a skin that turned him into a wolf; he was declared insane and confined to a monastery. As wolf populations diminished across Europe, so too did belief in werewolves, though as recently as the twentieth century, ethnographers in Ghana reported widespread belief in 'were-hyenas.'

By the time Hollywood got hold of the werewolf, centuries of accumulated anxiety had crystallised into a specific formula: curse, transformation, remorse, violence, death. Craig Ian Mann's Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film traces how this cinematic tradition took shape. When Universal began making horror classics in the 1930s, the werewolf joined the pantheon: first in Werewolf of London (1935), then with greater success in Lon Chaney Jr's The Wolf Man (1941). While Werewolf of London offered a stunning transformation sequence, it was Chaney's cursed Larry Talbot who became as iconic to the werewolf myth as Lugosi was for Dracula and Karloff for Frankenstein's creature. The werewolf became one of the most brutal of monsters and yet, following Chaney's lead, often evoked the greatest sympathy, presented as being as much victim as monster.

The Wolf Man and its sequels (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula) were exceptionally patriotic, pro-American texts that emerged directly from the Second World War. The films articulated an overarching theme of noble sacrifice that was inestimably important in 1940s America. Larry Talbot was the only American character in these films, and also the only character that remained morally incorruptible. He was contrasted against European monsters possessing nothing but negative traits: Frankenstein's creature as mindlessly aggressive hulk; Count Dracula as cunningly manipulative and irredeemably evil; the hunchbacked Daniel as lustful, spiteful, and cowardly.

Talbot, however, was noble, self-sacrificing, and remorseful. The Wolf Man was singularly committed to finding a way to destroy the side of him that might cause pain. Even in his werewolf form, supposedly bestial and unpredictable, Talbot often intervened to stop his European counterparts from harming others. The root cause of Talbot's turmoil was that he was an unwitting and reluctant murderer in his werewolf form. This paralleled the experience of American servicemen: ordinary men forced to confront a frightening and violent new reality as the United States went to war.

The fictional folkloric poem, written by Curt Siodmak and recited throughout the Wolf Man saga, makes this explicit:

By the time the war ended in August 1945, the United States military had suffered over 400,000 troops killed and 670,000 wounded. The Wolf Man saga articulated a sense that such enormous sacrifice was necessary in the pursuit of peace and justice. At the climax of House of Dracula (released December 1945, just four months after Japan's surrender), the American Talbot (now cured of his curse) chooses to stay and risk his own life by returning to confront the demonic Germanic scientist and Frankenstein's monster. He shoots the doctor dead, subdues the creature, and allows the castle to collapse and consume the monster. Through his humanity, determination and self-sacrifice, he has been cured of his werewolfism, defeated his European enemies, and found redemption. Talbot had finally won his war.

This is what I mean when I say the werewolf is culturally mutable. The same monster that represented American wartime sacrifice in the 1940s could become the cuddly comic Teen Wolf in 1985, the virile and hyper-masculine Jack Nicholson in Wolf (1994), or the sympathetic David Kessler in An American Werewolf in London (1981). There are werewolves for every generation, speaking to diverse and complex social, cultural, political histories that shaped and moulded this shapeshifter into new forms and new narratives.

So when Wolfwalkers deliberately rejects the 'classic werewolf tropes,' it's rejecting a very specific tradition: the cursed, remorseful, horror-inflected American werewolf epitomised by Larry Talbot. And what it reaches for instead is much older, much stranger, and far more radical.

The Laignech Fáelad were said to be men from Ossory (modern-day Kilkenny and Laois) who had the ability to transform into wolves at will. Unlike modern werewolves, they weren't cursed. They served as warrior-guardians who protected their people, going into the wilderness to fight enemies or hunt. They could live as wolves for years at a time, then return to human form.

This story was written down by Christian monks, who sometimes reframed these people as cursed. But earlier versions suggest voluntary, noble transformation. Gerald of Wales (twelfth-century cleric) recorded a tale in his Topographia Hibernica about a couple from Ossory who could turn into wolves. The wolves retained human consciousness, could speak, sought out clergy to give last rites. Gerald was more curious than horrified, treating them as evidence of Ireland's strange wonders.

This is the tradition Wolfwalkers draws upon: not Gothic horror of lycanthropy, but the older, stranger idea of humans who moved between forms as easily as crossing a threshold. Transformation as capacity rather than curse. Shapeshifting as what Camilla With Pedersen would call 'voluntary transformation', self-initiated, chosen, a refusal to accept imposed categorical boundaries.

The film connects this directly to colonisation. The Lord Protector (Cromwell, though unnamed) represents precisely the kind of categorical thinking that shapeshifters violate. Humans are humans, wolves are wolves, the forest must be tamed, categories must be enforced. The wolfwalkers refuse this logic entirely. They are both/and rather than either/or, existing in the liminal space medieval theology found so threatening and so necessary.

As Mary Douglas reminds us, monsters flourish in the perilous nooks and crannies of thought: those polluted spaces between established categories. Victor Turner calls this perpetually liminal. In that zone, change isn't a maybe. It's coming for you, whether you like it or not.

Robyn Goodfellowe and the Shakespearean Echo

Robyn is part of a Puritan society, yet her name suggests fairies. That's not accidental. Using the name Robyn Goodfellowe isn't just a literary reference. It positions the film in direct conversation with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is a shapeshifter, prankster, servant to Oberon. He causes chaos but also brings resolution. Lives on the edge between human and fairy worlds. His name 'Goodfellow' implies cheer or kindness, but masks his disruptive nature.

Robyn Goodfellowe in Wolfwalkers is a human girl who transforms into a wolfwalker, literally becoming wild, magical, free in the forest. Like Puck, she's a bridge between worlds: town and forest, coloniser and native, human and wolf. Her journey involves breaking rules, sneaking into forbidden spaces, disrupting authority.

The forest in both works serves as liminal space, threshold between civilised and wild, rational and magical. As I discussed in A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting, these are the spaces where transformation becomes not merely possible but inevitable. The forest in Wolfwalkers is magical, dangerous, sacred, standing in opposition to the controlled Puritanical town. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the forest outside Athens is likewise a space of transformation, magic, misrule.

'Bill' is a common nickname for William. Given the heavy allusion to Robin Goodfellow, it's hard to ignore that naming her father Bill Goodfellowe seems a deliberate nod to William Shakespeare himself. Robyn and Bill's father-daughter dynamic reflects the central tension in Shakespeare's play between old authority and new freedom.

Bill wants to protect Robyn by keeping her in the structured, 'civilised' world of the city. Robyn resists that protection, seeks wilder, freer existence in the forest, eventually joining the wolfwalkers. This mirrors conflicts in Midsummer, between Theseus and the younger lovers, between Oberon and Titania whose quarrels disrupt nature's balance.

In a subtle way, Wolfwalkers invites reading where Robyn is not just a Puck figure but the new generation rewriting old stories. Bill (William), like Shakespeare, represents the dominant storytelling tradition: patriarchal, structured, aligned with empire. Robyn defies that tradition by entering the forest, embracing shapeshifting magic, choosing freedom over obedience.

Robyn rewrites her father's story. This is shapeshifting as narrative act, transformation as refusal of inherited categories.

The Lord Protector & Ratcliffe

The main antagonists in Wolfwalkers and Pocahontas are both English colonial figures who represent the destructive clash between colonialism and nature. Governor Ratcliffe in Pocahontas is driven by personal greed and vanity, obsessed with finding gold to impress King James, while the Lord Protector in Wolfwalkers is driven by ideology and fear, genuinely believing he's bringing civilisation to the 'wild' Irish lands. Both seek to destroy the natural world and suppress Indigenous peoples, but Ratcliffe does so for personal gain while the Lord Protector acts out of authoritarian control and religious fervour.

The films take different tonal approaches to similar themes. Ratcliffe is flamboyant and theatrical, a classic Disney villain with purple outfits and over-the-top songs like 'Mine, Mine, Mine,' while the Lord Protector is austere, humourless, and genuinely menacing. The conflict in Pocahontas remains largely external, with Ratcliffe as a distant threat, but Wolfwalkers makes it personal. Despite these differences in execution, both antagonists serve the same narrative purpose: exploring how colonialism destroys both the environment and the cultures that live in harmony with it.

Secret of Kells

The beauty here is the inspiration of the Book of Kells itself. The entire film is structured like a page from that illuminated manuscript. Compositions are flattened, decorative, filled with intricate knotwork and spirals. Aisling, the forest spirit, is surrounded by circular, organic patterns that seem to grow and breathe. The forest is rendered not as realistic woodland but as tapestry of interlocking shapes and stylised foliage.

This is animation that honours the two-dimensional page rather than attempting depth or realism. This commitment to pattern and ornamentation is rejection of three-dimensional perspective dominating most Western animation. Instead, Cartoon Saloon draws from medieval illuminators who saw no need for realistic space. They were illustrating spiritual truths, not physical ones.

Secret of Kells does the same. Every frame is an illumination.

Aisling is a margin-dweller, a forest spirit who exists in the space Christianity officially claimed but never fully controlled. She's simultaneously threatening and helpful, wild and wise, outside the monastery's walls but essential to its greatest work.

And here's where animation does something film cannot. Animation, as theorist Paul Wells argues, operates as 'the hard copy of psychological memory', not merely recording what happened, but preserving the felt experience of what it meant. The swirling patterns in Secret of Kells aren't representations of Celtic knotwork. They're the experience of eternity made visible, the sensation of interconnection rendered as movement. Drawing in animation becomes, as Len Lye understood, the direct expression of 'the bodily stuff', the meaning at the heart of the expression, unmediated by the camera's supposedly objective gaze.

The Design of the Northmen

The Viking raiders are rendered in sharp, angular designs that feel almost alien compared to the soft, circular patterns of the Celtic monastery. Their ships cut through the frame: harsh lines, geometric brutality.

The Northmen represent threat not just to lives but to knowledge, art, spiritual continuity. Their design language speaks to destruction, to severing of connections. Yet the film refuses to fully demonise them. They remain forces of nature, storm-like, rather than evil incarnate.

The film's sympathy lies with the monks and their illuminated manuscripts, but it acknowledges that history is written in such invasions, that beauty and violence have always coexisted.

Celtic Design

The Celtic knotwork dominating the film's visual language is more than decoration. It represents continuity, infinity, interconnection of all things. These patterns have no beginning and no end. They loop back on themselves eternally.

In a film about preserving knowledge and culture in the face of destruction, this is deeply symbolic. The Book of Kells survives. The patterns continue. Even when the monastery falls, the illuminations endure.

Song of the Sea

The influence of Spirited Away is clear here. Both films deal with a child navigating a magical realm to save a family member, both steeped in folklore of their respective cultures. Saoirse, like Chihiro, is quiet, determined, must find her voice (literally, in Saoirse's case) to break a curse and restore balance.

But Song of the Sea is unmistakably Irish. The selkie myth at its heart is given the same reverence Miyazaki gives to kami and spirits. The sea is not backdrop. It is presence, character, mother. The film's colour palette (soft blues, greys, golds) evokes the Irish coast in a way that feels both realistic and dreamlike.

The Setting of Samhain

The choice to set key scenes during Samhain (Halloween) is inspired. In Irish tradition, this is when the veil between worlds is thinnest, when spirits and humans might meet. It's the perfect moment for Saoirse to fully embrace her selkie nature and for Ben to confront Macha, the owl witch who has been turning emotions to stone.

Halloween here isn't about costumes and sweets. It's about liminality, about standing at the threshold.

The film uses this timing to underscore its themes of grief, memory, letting go. The magical and the mundane overlap. The audience is invited to believe in both simultaneously.

This is shapeshifting of another kind. Not physical transformation but emotional, psychological. Ben must transform his understanding of his mother, his sister, his own grief. The film argues that this internal shapeshifting (the willingness to change how you see the world, to accept what you've been denying) is as profound as any physical metamorphosis.

The selkie's coat functions identically to Gawain's green girdle: both are material objects carrying the memory and meaning of transformation, marking the moment when one identity gives way to another, when categorical boundaries dissolve.

Christian Shrines Above Gateways

That any gateway to the Otherworld has a Christian shrine built above it is quietly brilliant. Throughout Ireland, holy wells, fairy forts, ancient stones were Christianised: a saint's name, a small shrine. The film acknowledges this layering of belief systems without judgement.

This is exactly what medieval Christianity did. It couldn't erase the old magic, so it built shrines on top of it. Claimed it. Renamed it. But the magic persisted underneath, in the margins, in the stories people still told when the priests weren't listening.

Song of the Sea suggests that the old magic and the new religion coexist, that one hasn't quite erased the other. For Cartoon Saloon, this is part of a broader project: reclaiming Irish mythology and folklore not as quaint relics but as living, breathing stories. The Christian shrines don't cancel the magic. They mark it, remember it, perhaps even protect it.

This is theological compartmentalisation made visual. The same mechanism medieval culture used to accept shapeshifting as legitimate literary and artistic device whilst maintaining its theological illegitimacy. The shrine says 'this is Christian space' whilst the gateway underneath whispers 'but the Otherworld is still here.'

The Breadwinner

The Breadwinner is set in 2001, during the final years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. This is Cartoon Saloon's most politically direct film, and also its most stylistically restrained.

Gone are decorative flourishes of Celtic knotwork or soft watercolours of selkie seas. Instead, the animation is grounded, muted. The palette is dusty, sun-bleached, ochre and grey. It reflects the harshness of Parvana's world, where beauty must be carefully guarded and survival is daily negotiation.

Yet even here, Cartoon Saloon cannot resist the power of storytelling itself.

Parvana tells a folk tale throughout the film, animated in a different style entirely: cut-paper silhouettes, bold colours, mythic and timeless. These sequences offer her (and us) momentary escape, but they also give her strength. The story she tells becomes framework for understanding her own life, her own courage.

It's a tale of a boy on a quest to reclaim seeds stolen by the Elephant King, journey fraught with danger but driven by love and duty. The parallels to Parvana's situation are clear but never heavy-handed. The folk tale gives her a language for her fear, her determination, her hope.

The Breadwinner is about resilience, yes. But it's also about the act of storytelling as resistance. In a regime that sought to erase women from public life, to silence them, Parvana's disguise as a boy allows her to move freely. But her stories allow her to remain herself.

This is shapeshifting as survival strategy. Parvana literally transforms her appearance to navigate spaces forbidden to her. But she maintains internal continuity through story. The folk tale she tells becomes the thread connecting who she was to who she must become, the pattern that persists even when external form must change.

The film argues that imagination is not frivolous. It is survival. When everything else can be taken from you, stories remain. They can be hidden, carried, and retold. They adapt and endure.

What makes this film remarkable within Cartoon Saloon's oeuvre is its refusal to aestheticise suffering. It doesn't make poverty or oppression beautiful. The streets of Kabul are rendered with documentary-like attention: the rubble, the dust, the worn faces of people ground down by years of war and repression.

But the film insists that people living under such conditions are still whole, still complex, still deserving of stories honouring their humanity. Parvana is not a victim. She is a hero. Clever, resourceful, brave. She finds ways to navigate impossible restrictions. She supports her family. She risks everything to save her father.

The Taliban soldiers are not cartoon villains. Some are young, uncertain, following orders they may not fully understand. Others are true believers, convinced of their righteousness. The film doesn't excuse them, but it presents them as human, which makes their actions all the more chilling.

Oppression is not carried out by monsters. It's carried out by people. Which means it can happen anywhere, to anyone. Which means resistance must be equally human, equally ordinary, equally persistent.

The two visual styles function as what the film theorist Lev Manovich calls 'cultural interfaces': they allow us to navigate between different registers of truth, different ways of knowing. The folk tale isn't escape from reality. It's a different way of apprehending reality, one that the Taliban's literalist enforcement of categories cannot touch.

My Father's Dragon

My Father's Dragon (2022) is Cartoon Saloon's most recent full-length feature, and whilst it doesn't engage as directly with Irish mythology, it continues the studio's commitment to visual storytelling that privileges imagination over realism.

The film adapts Ruth Stiles Gannett's 1948 children's novel, and in doing so, demonstrates how Cartoon Saloon's visual language can be applied to material from outside their immediate cultural context. The aesthetic is gentler than Wolfwalkers (more watercolour than woodcut) but the commitment to pattern, to flatness, to the two-dimensional page as valid space for truth-telling remains.

What's particularly interesting is how the film handles the theme of ecological collapse and forced migration through the lens of friendship between a boy and a dragon. The island is literally sinking.

The dragon, Boris, is trapped by categorical thinking: dragons are meant to be fierce, powerful, useful. But Boris is anxious, uncertain, kind. The film's resolution requires both boy and dragon to reject the categories imposed upon them and forge something new.

A Studio Apart

Cartoon Saloon has become a beacon for independent animation, proving you don't need Pixar or Disney budgets to create films of lasting power and beauty. Their work is deeply rooted in place (Ireland, Afghanistan) and in specific textures of cultural memory, yet it speaks universally.

They understand that folklore is a way of seeing the world, of encoding wisdom, of asking questions that don't have easy answers.

What unites these films is belief in the transformative power of art and story. Whether it's Brendan illuminating manuscripts, Saoirse singing her selkie song, Robyn running with the wolves, or Parvana telling her tale of the boy and the elephant, each protagonist uses creativity and imagination to navigate a world that seeks to control or silence them.

Cartoon Saloon's films are, in this sense, deeply political. They argue that beauty, memory, and storytelling are not luxuries but necessities. They are how we remain human in the face of dehumanisation.

They deploy animation's distinctive language: what theorists identify as metamorphosis (seamless transition between states), condensation (maximum suggestion in minimum imagery), anthropomorphism (human characteristics on animals and objects), fabrication (creation of imaginary orders), penetration (visualisation of invisible interiors), and symbolic association (use of abstract visual signs). But they use these tools not for spectacle or sentiment, but for epistemological insurgency. Every transformation questions a category. 

This is the same argument medieval illuminators made when they filled the margins with monsters.

This gesture, the deliberate reclamation of indigenous visual traditions to challenge and replace the Disney idiom, has historical precedent. Countries around the world initially borrowed the Disney aesthetic as 'state of the art,' then drew upon more indigenous stylings to assert cultural identity. In China, the Shanghai Studios used calligraphic approaches. In Japan, visual constructions from Hokusai and Floating World painters. In Britain, portraiture, satirical caricature, and modernist forms. Ireland's manuscript tradition, with its endless knots and liminal creatures, provides Cartoon Saloon with a visual vocabulary that predates (and implicitly challenges) the supposed universality of Hollywood animation.