102 min | PG | November 13, 2020 | GKIDS
An English girl in occupied Ireland hunts wolves with her father until she meets a girl who is one. Their friendship sets the wild forest against the walled town that wants it gone. Cartoon Saloon draws the cage and the freedom by hand, and the hand wins.
Robyn Goodfellowe is an English girl in 1650s Kilkenny. Her father hunts wolves for the Lord Protector, the puritanical Englishman who rules the town and wants the forest outside the walls cleared. Robyn wants to hunt too. Then she meets Mebh, a wild girl who runs with the wolf pack and turns into a wolf when she sleeps. Wolfwalkers uses Irish folklore to tell a story about colonization, conformity, and the cost of caging what is wild.
Honor Kneafsey voices Robyn with a restless energy that the town keeps trying to flatten. She plays a girl told to scrub floors when she wants to run free, and the frustration reads in every line. Eva Whittaker voices Mebh as pure feral momentum, talking fast and tumbling over her own words. The contrast between the two girls drives the film. Sean Bean voices Robyn’s father Bill as a man trapped between loving his daughter and serving the system that feeds them. Simon McBurney voices the Lord Protector with cold certainty that makes the villainy feel bureaucratic rather than cartoonish.
Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart direct in hand-drawn animation that splits the world in two. The town is rendered in rigid straight lines and oppressive verticals that box the characters in. The forest explodes into loose, organic linework and wood-grain textures that seem to breathe. The film visualizes the wolf senses through a swirling charcoal-and-scent point of view that lets the audience perceive the world the way Mebh does. Will Collins writes the script so the geometry does the thematic work, with the cage of the town and the freedom of the woods stated entirely through shape.
This is the strongest film in Cartoon Saloon’s Irish folklore cycle. It takes a simple friendship and loads it with weight about empire, faith, and the things authority insists on destroying because it cannot control them. The animation refuses the smooth digital gloss of its contemporaries and gains enormous feeling from the refusal. Robyn and Mebh want the same thing every wild thing wants, which is to run. The film understands exactly who builds the walls that stop them.