Animation Nation - Take 2

Small steps brought The Secret of Kells to New York.  Image from this New York Times slideshow.

Back in October, I wrote about attending Singapore's animation festival and seeing The Secret of Kells (sound alert), a movie directed by 33-year-old Irishman Tomm Moore.  Well, Moore's secret is now out in a big way.  The Secret earned a write-up in the New York Times on Tuesday, a major place in the New York International Children's Film Festival this month, and  a wider opening in Manhattan from today.  It also has a chance to shine at the Oscars as a nominee in the best animated feature category.  The NYT story focused only a bit on the historical underpinnings of the film and its aesthetic that I enjoyed so much.  Check out the paper's separate review to read about the distinct stylings of the animation.  Instead the big debut piece devoted most of its column inches to the word-of-mouth marketing effort employed by the film's distributors, both worldwide and in America, that earned it an Academy Award nomination.

The Secret's nomination puts it in competition with the very good films Up and Coraline.  It has only a very modest chance of success against these films, but the nomination should be a great encouragement to smaller animation outfits throughout the world.  Its inclusion loosens up the nominations monopoly usually held by Disney/Pixar.  Plus another heavyweight studio 20th Century Fox debuted Fantastic Mr. Fox to great acclaim and their own Oscar nomination this year.  The overall quality among this year's nominations suggests animation's widening talent pool should give filmgoers even more quality features to relish, even as the past decade has proven so good.  

New Yorker readers,  give The Secret of Kells a try, and if you want to be charmed by the early work of another great animation director, seek out Brad Bird's Iron Giant from 1999.

Animation Nation

Max Horovitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) has anxiety problems. Image from the Mary & Max website.

Singapore's annual Animation Nation 2009 festival finished this week. The Passengers managed to see two wonderful, whimsical features: Mary & Max and The Secret of Kells. The week of moving pictures was put on my the Singapore Film Society and hosted at the National Museum's (blogged here) lecture theater/cinema. The selections this year included cartoons from around the world and with varying tones of seriousness. Waltz with Bashir, animated recollections from Israeli soldiers, is definitely not a kids' movie, but the adventures of Brendan through the Irish wilderness in The Secret of Kells are a young boy's fantasy.

Aisling and Brendan explore the forest in The Secret of Kells. Guriguriblog has a great look at the film's Insular qualities.

Both of the films we saw arrived on a diplomatic platform. Mary & Max, a really touching story about unlikely pen pals writing from Australia and New York City in the 1970's, came to Singapore as part of the cultural outreach of the Australian High Commission, and the Irish HC actually sent a representative to introduce the Secret of Kells as we saw the film on the festival's opening night. The diplomatic missions to Singapore often play a visible role in the island's social/cultural scene. In part, this serves to bring a bit of home to the various ex-pat communities here, but these countries also want to promote themselves to encourage business and trade relationships with Singaporeans. Next weekend begins Berlin Dayz, courtesy of the German Embassy Singapore.

The cat Pangur Ban in The Secret of Kells gets his name from a Gaelic poem written by an Irish monk in the ninth century. More character sketches from the filmmakers here.

And did I mention The Secret of Kells weaves its tale around the creation of the famous Irish illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, made around 800 CE? What could be better?