Paul can't get excited like us or his fake beard falls off.
Official Band photo.
so L.A.
Those are some good burgers dude.
Two animators from Germany.
The actual Mr.Erlinghauser meets the actual Mr.Incredible. .
paul and upside down paul
Paul Young , the man, the trousers, the legend
His face visibly lights up when asked about his new endeavour, The Secret of Kells, an animated movie telling the story of 12-year-old boy, also called Brendan, who must fight Vikings and a serpent to find a crystal and complete the legendary Book of Kells. Gleeson provides the voice of Abbot Cellach, Brendan's strict uncle.
"It's an exquisite cinematic experience. There's nothing overly Irish about it. It's about beautiful things, it's about fear and getting over fear, guarding the things that are beautiful and worth it, and not being unafraid to go and find it, to go and do it."
The film has its educational merits, too, I suggest. "Don't use that word, you're not allowed to use that word," Gleeson counteracts with a smirk, "because if people think it's a history lesson, they're not going to go. They'll say, 'Ah, I might see it on DVD'. It's to be seen in a cinema. Go and get your head blown away by it."
Friday March 06 2009
The good people at Cartoon Saloon spent a number of years developing and making this ambitous full-length Irish animation that attempts to knit the creation of the Book of Kells into a story about a young boy's voyage of self-discovery. Overall, it succeeds quite magnificently, and it's a real and rare pleasure to watch an ambitious and classy animation skilfully execute a distinctively Irish theme. The story revolves around the fortified Monastery of Kells in the ninth century, as the monks hear increasingly terrifying news of the approaching Vikings.
Twelve-year-old Brendan (Evan McGuire) is apprentice to his fearsome uncle, Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), the monastery's Abbot. Brendan is a curious young boy, but Cellach has no time for his frivolities and will not let him wander in the woods outside the settlement. However, their ordered life is shaken up by the arrival of the celebrated master illuminator, Brother Aidan (Mick Lally).
Aidan brings with him an extraordinary book he is trying to finish, and begins to initiate Brendan into the mysteries of his art, much to the Abbot's displeasure. And Brendan finds himself in big trouble when he sneaks off to the forsest looking for ink berries, and meets a mischievious fairy.
The Secret of Kells spirits you back to the early Irish stories of your childhood. It's quite beautifully animated, and in colourfully imaginative sequences the very pages of the Book of Kells spring gloriously to life.
The story is sweet and dark in equal parts, and the fearsome bulky Vikings might be a bit much for the very young, but anyone else is bound to enjoy it.
- Paul Whitington
Directed by Tomm Moore. Voices of Evan McGuire, Christen Mooney, Mick Lally, Brendan Gleeson. PG cert, gen release, 75 min
HMM? CARTOON Saloon, an animation house based in Kilkenny, has put together a feature based around the creation of The Book of Kells. The prospect is not altogether an enticing one. One imagines a soberly narrated, drably animated information film, suitable for tourists queuing up at The Kells Experience: “Here we see the monks boiling up beetroot to prepare the cochineal dye.” And so forth.
Happily, The Secret of Kells is not like that at all. Director Tomm Moore and his talented team – hunch-shouldered in darkness, one imagines, like those ninth-century monks – have assiduously avoided lazy options to deliver an entity of considerable beauty and originality.
Fans of Genndy Tartakovsky, the Russian animator of classic series such as Samurai Jack and Dexter’s Laboratory , will admire the way Moore bends the Russian’s key techniques (bold lines, eccentric camera angles) to his own, very different ends. Wolves are rendered as jagged flashes. The Vikings become looming tree- people. Equally impressive are the flat, painterly backgrounds, which nod towards the perspective-free world of pre-Renaissance art.
The script is not quite as impressive as the visuals. Almost entirely abandoning any reference to Christianity for nods towards other, more ancient myths, the film follow young Brendan (nicely voiced by Evan McGuire) as he falls out with his uncle (Brendan Gleeson), a stern Abbot, and makes friends with another, more eccentric monk named Aidan (Mick Lally).
Inspired by Brother Aidan’s talent for illumination, Brendan gets drawn into the quest for a magic jewel and, in his wanderings, encounters various monsters, sinister Norsemen and a sort of benevolent female wolf-spirit.
The story does have a neat arc and the voice-work is first rate, but the thinly drawn characters are sometimes upstaged by the bold images and by the fine, insistent music from KÃla and Bruno Coulais. Moreover, the desire to pack in so much research seems to have occasionally overpowered the need to create a clean narrative line.
These are quibbles. The Secret of Kells remains a surprising piece of work that should appeal to smart children and open-minded adults. Chemically befuddled students may enjoy it even more.
The iconic tome is the inspiration for a new Irish film involving serpents, Vikings and a bold young hero – and there’s not a single leprechaun in sight
WHEN Tomm Moore, a young animator from Kilkenny, decided to embark on his first feature film, he was keen to explore Irish themes, locations and idioms. There were, of course, dangers in this approach.
“Oh, that’s right. I definitely didn’t want to make Darby O’Gill and the Little People ,” he laughs. “You will, in this business, often hear people coming up with ideas like Larry the Leprechaun. “No really! ‘He could be the next Mickey Mouse’, they’ll say.” Nearly a decade after Moore and his team began their efforts, The Secret of Kells arrives in cinemas and, as the director intended, it wraps itself in Celtic garb without drifting towards heritage cinema or indulging in Paddywhackery. Setting out to construct a fresh myth surrounding the creation of The Book of Kells , the film follows Brendan, a plucky 12-year-old, as he fights magical serpents and Vikings while in pursuit of an enchanted crystal.
The story – which also features monks voiced by such luminaries as Brendan Gleeson and Mick Lally – may be a tad disorganised, but it works as a surface on which to hang some genuinely sumptuous visuals.
Every frame of this film shows evidence of Moore’s fertile imagination and determination to avoid the obvious. Vikings appear as angry towers. Wolves are jagged silhouettes. Kila, the innovative hyper-folk musicians, provide surprising aural punctuation.
“We looked at a lot of medieval art and Japanese art,” he says. “We were trying to build a world that reflected art before they mastered perspective. That is the world these characters live in. So the fields have the flat look of ancient tapestries. Then, when we wanted to bring in some danger, we would suddenly allow perspective back into the frame. We liked to give the impression danger was breaking through this safe screen.”
There are some peculiarities to the piece. One notices, for instance, the near absence of any reference to Christianity. A viewer could sit through Moore’s film and be unaware that The Book of Kells is a transcription of the gospels.
“Yeah, yeah. That might be right,” he says. “I was really happy when we showed it in the suburbs of Paris to an audience of largely Muslim kids. They still liked it and they responded to it. They asked questions about knowledge being preserved, which is what the film is about. You can’t separate Irish myth from Christianity, but Celtic Christianity is a very unique kind of Christianity. But I see the same themes of death and life in, say, the story of Cúchulainn. I’m more interested in that than I am in the religious aspect.”
Fair enough. But he seems to be suggesting that downplaying the Christian aspects was a marketing decision as well as an artistic one. “To be honest, before we started working with our French co-producers, it hadn’t dawned on us how Christian the story seems. Our French producer, Didier Brunner, said it was a very interesting story, but he wanted to keep it universal. We were conscious of that and played it down. We refer to ‘the Book’, not ‘the Bible’ .”
Moore seems like a clever, determined young man. This is, I suppose, hardly surprising. You would require a degree of drive and a layer of wit to run your own animation studio in the midlands of Ireland. In 1999, shortly after graduating from the animation course at Ballyfermot College of Further Education, he set up the Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny and the company has remained busy ever since.
“I was one of those kids who was always being told off for drawing in class at school,” he explains. “I went into animation with a mind to doing comics, actually. I suspected that doing animation was a bit like factory work. But then I realised how much computers freed up your creativity.”
That’s interesting. A lot of old-school animators complain about the influence of computers, but Moore believes that, even when working in a two-dimensional environment like that of The Secret of Kells , computers empower the imagination. “Yes. It has freed everybody up. Ironically, the computer has allowed us to do something that looks handmade.”
Cartoon Saloon initially made its money by providing animations for commercials and websites. The brief craze for e-cards (remember them?) was, Moore admits, a godsend in the early days. Recently, they have had success with a highly amusing TV series entitled Skunk Fu – in which, yes, a skunk performs martial arts – but Moore was always intent on nudging the team towards a commercial feature.
Eight years ago, they were fortunate enough to bump into representatives of Les Armateurs, the company that produced the wonderful Belleville Rendezvous , and, to the Cartoon Salooners’ delight, the French studio signed on as co-producers of T he Secret of Kells . Financiers from a host of different countries were then enticed into contributing variously sized wads of cash. Eventually they scraped together €6 million, which is a lot for an Irish film, but a small amount for an animated feature.
“We call it Frankenfinance. It’s alive! It’s alive!” he laughs. “The producers who had creative input were, though, all of the right mindset – Canal+ and Les Armateurs in France, in particular. They were interested in doing something different and they were very interested in the Irish aspect.”
But were they tolerant of the eccentric visual style? The Secret of Kells may have a child as its protagonist, but, with its expressionistic flourishes and its nods towards pre-renaissance painting, it does come across a little like an art film. The picture is closer in appearance to a freaky 1960s head movie than it is to, say, Bambi or Dumbo .
Did the producers ever ask Moore to make the film look more like a Saturday morning cartoon? Was there pressure to deliver flashy 3-D computer animation? “Oh, no. Quite the opposite,” he says. “Les Armateurs had built up a reputation for doing work like Belleville Rendezvous . They had been all told that 2-D animation was dead and they proved them wrong. So we thought, let’s do something that’s really 2-D . All the backgrounds are painted in the old-school style.” Still, the producers and distributors must fret about who the film is actually for .
“There were some producers who said ‘no’ because they couldn’t place who it was for. We have found, after testing it in France and Belgium, that it works best with families – with kids and their parents. There was a longer version, but I had to cut quite a bit out of it because there were bits where it was too dark, too heavy. That really, really hurt.”
At any rate, the film’s charm is tied up with its eccentricity and originality. In the same way that Belleville Rendezvous caught a particular sense of Frenchness, The Secret of Kells gets at an (admittedly antique) class of Irishness.
FOR HIS NEXT project, Song of the Sea , Moore is once again dealing with a story that draws from ancient Irish mythology. It’s nice to see such tales being treated in such an unconventional manner, but I am surprised, given the endless narrative possibilities offered by animation, that he isn’t keener on reaching out into the wider world (or the universe, for that matter).
“Well, we do Skunk Fu ,” he says. “And we’re doing a project called Bluebeard that is made in Eastern Europe. But, yes, maybe next time I will make a film about girls in bikinis in outer space.” Larry the Leprechaun meets the Bikini Girls from Space? It could work.
The Secret of Kells is on general release
The Secret of Kells
(Tomm Moore): Voices of Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally, Evan Maguire, Christen Mooney
Running time: 78 mins (PG)
Rating: 4/5
Forget about Mission Impossible or Batman saving Gotham City from the Joker. In The Secret of Kells, Brendan, a small red-haired boy in a novice's habit, has a much more daring and meaningful quest. Defying his abbot and eluding marauding vikings beyond the monastery walls, he slips out into a forest of devilish wolves in search of the oak berries needed to provide ink pigments for what could become one of the greatest illuminated manuscripts in western civilisation. Conceived by Tomm Moore and his co-director Nora Twomey, The Secret of Kells is exquisitely realised in terms of the aesthetics of medieval culture, unfolding like a lavishly illustrated old scroll suddenly coming to life. By opting for 2-D hand-drawn imagery rather than computer-generated 3-D animation, Moore achieves a natural marriage of form and historical content and also shows a marvellous empathy with the comic, the way children imagine and create pictures – with flat drawings and bursts of colour.
Berlinale film The Secret Of Kells wins at Cartoon Movie Tributes Martin Blaney in Berlin 09 Mar 2009 14:45 |
Brendan And The Secret Of Kells was the big winner at this year's Cartoon Movie in Lyon, winning best European director and best producer.
More than six hundred participants voted for the Cartoon Movie Tributes which recognise companies or personalities exercising a positive and dynamic influence on the European animation feature film industry.
Irish animator Tomm Moore was named best European director of the year for his feature debut Brendan And The Secret Of Kells which had had its world premiere in the Berlinale's Generation sidebar last month.
In addition, the film's producers Cartoon Saloon, Les Armateurs and Vivi Film were voted as best European producer of the year.
The Irish-French-Belgian co-production was first pitched by Moore and Paul Young at the Cartoon Movie market in Babelsberg in 2001.
Meanwhile, the Cartoon Movie Tribute for best European distributor of the Year went to Bac Films in recognition of its particular emphasis on European animation films.
Last year saw the French distributor releasing Niko And The Way To The Stars, which posted over 700,000 admissions, and this year's releases include A Case For Friends and Jasper The Movie.
Bac Films recently picked up The Sandman And The Lost Sand Of Dreams and Journey To Saturn which screened on the evening of this year's edition of Cartoon Movie.
Animation magazine -
Cartoon Movie wrapped up the first edition in its new locale in Lyon, France, by awarding tributes to the top performers in European animation, and by reporting record attendance from participants, buyers and distributors.
Attendance hit a high of 622, up 21 percent from 510 at last year’s event, which was held the previous ten years at the Babelsberg Studio in Berlin.
The number of distributors was up nearly 20 percent rising from 66 last year to 79. The number of buyers, which includes distributors, also rose more than 20 percent from 144 to 174.
The event also presented tributes to Tomm Moore of Ireland as Best European Director of the Year for The Secret of the Kells; BAC Films of France as Best European Distributor of the Year; and Best European Producer of the year to the trio of Cartoon Saloon (Ireland), Les Armateurs (France) and Vivi Film (Belgium), also for The Secret of Kells.
 |
Organised by the European Association of Animation Film, the Cartoon Movie Tributes rewards outstanding achievements, companies or personalities that have had a positive and dynamic influence on the European animation feature film industry. Winners of these awards are selected by the industry professionals participating in Cartoon Movie 2009, the annual meeting point for the European animation industry.
Released across Ireland last weekend, ‘The Secret of Kells’ set in 9th century Ireland follows twelve-year-old Brendan who must overcome his deepest fears on a secret quest to completing an enchanting book of illuminations.
The illuminated animation is the feature debut of director Tomm Moore and is produced by Paul Young of the Cartoon Saloon – the makers behind animation series ‘Skunk Fu’.
French company BAC Films who have been involved in distributing Magma Films ‘Niko & the Way to the Stars’ were also named the Best European Distributor of the Year.
Advertising on the back of Dublin buses. I hope I see them before they are done there run up there. Last night Nora and I attended the screening in the Cork French Film Festival. It was great and some old friends from Cork came along too.
HOTPRESS
4 STARS
Set in ninth century
Print
Email