There are two massively acclaimed animated feature films arriving in viewers’ homes this month. One of them, Pixar’s “Soul,” premieres on Disney+ on Christmas Day. The other, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s “Wolfwalkers,” is in select theaters now and debuting on Apple TV+ on Friday. You can’t go wrong with either picture, but the former may turn out to be the bigger surprise for general audiences.
READ MORE: “Wolfwalkers”: Animated Irish myth is a stunning masterwork [Review]
The third in a series of Irish folktale inspired features, “Wolfwalkers” centers on the unlikely friendship between Robyn (Honor Kneafsey), an English girl accompanying her father to medieval Ireland, and Mebh (Eva Whittaker), a young pup whose family has the magical ability to transform into a wolf. Part of a pesky pack, Mebh finds herself struggling to revive her comatose mother while Robyn’s father (Sean Bean) is under orders for a nefarious local lord to eliminate every wolf in sight.
The film was the surprise winner of the audience award at AFI Fest 2020 and earned a Best International Film nomination from the IFP Gotham Awards. And, considering both of Moore’s previous films, “The Secret of Kells” and “Song of the Sea,” both earned Animated Feature nominations, it would be shocking if “Wolfwalkers” didn’t complete the Oscar trifecta.
Moore and Stewart jumped on the phone last month to discuss how their feature barely finished before the initial COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and modifying their award-winning aesthetic for this particular adventure.
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The Playlist: Where did the idea or “Wolfwalkers” come from? Was this something screenwriter Will Collins pitched to your company?
Tomm Moore: Oh, no. All the movies I’ve directed or co-directed we came up with the story first, and then we brought a screenwriter in to help us develop it. Will had worked with me on “Song of the Sea” and then Ross and I had the bones of the original story. We asked Will to come in and help us bring it up to a screenplay. I mean, it was a lot of work and he brought a lot to it, but the actual mean, the characters, the themes and stuff, was stuff that Ross and I had come up with.
The Playlist: How many years did you guys work on this project?
Ross Stewart: Seven, seven years.
Tomm Moore: More years than we can remember Gregory. [Laughs.]
Ross Stewart: We were at a story workshop up in Dublin and we went for lunch in this lovely little veggie cafe and we just brought out the notebook and started writing down stuff that we were kind of passionate about. The nugget of the story just started from there, and then we wrote up a synopsis and then yeah, I think a year or two later, we got Will on board.
The Playlist: What were the origins of this story? Was there something that as kids you’d always heard of regarding these creatures in terms of folklore?
Tomm Moore: Well, we wanted to make a third film that was based on Irish folklore and history, that it kind of would fit with the previous two that I directed or co-directed “Song of the Sea” and “Secret of Kells.” We kind of wanted it to feel like a final piece and explore a lot of the themes that were kind of explored in those and we wanted to go further. We went kind of on a shopping trip through history and folklore to find the right stories that would go with the things you wanted. I remembered the wolf people of Austria. I remembered that mythology hearing about it as a teenager, but it’s not like terribly well-known, but it is local to the area where we grew up so that was interesting. And the idea that we could set it in that really tumultuous time, 400 years ago, or so when Ireland was being colonized and the wolves are being hunted to extinction by the English seemed like there was plenty of conflict in there. We sort of picked on that time period and that folklore and find the conflict within it, because the idea that one of the hunters who would come over from England to kill the wolves, that their child would make friends with an Irish kid and that the Irish kid would actually be one of the wolves that their dad is hunting, that just seemed like a great hook. It kind of came together. Like I said, like a shopping trip from different parts.
The Playlist: I want to ask about the style and aesthetic that you guys have cultivated. You have backgrounds that look like they are painted. Are they digial or are you scanning artwork?
Ross Stewart: It’s all traditional media and then scanned in and works digitally. All of the backgrounds, all the color backgrounds, there would be watercolor paintings done. Sometimes very loosely and then they would touch them up in Photoshop after. And then also we, for the time we did a lot of printmaking and we printed out shapes that we could use. Sometimes there were texture libraries, but then all of the linework is actual pencil and ink and charcoal and markers and stuff. The final line departments, they were really hands-on, it was all on paper. And we have stacks of beautiful artwork now, with all those backgrounds.
The Playlist: Compared to the other films you’ve done, was there anything you wanted to do differently to give “Wolfwalkers” its own aesthetic?
Tomm Moore: Yeah. I think what we just pushed further with in terms of the color and the difference in the shape language and the way the characters were drawn expressively, that their final would be left on-screen kind of rough if they were wild characters and stuff. That was all continuation of previous ideas, but probably the biggest change for us was getting into more immersive scenes, like when you see the wolf through the eyes of a wolf, and you’re traveling through the forest, we use digital technology to kind of create the forest first, but then after that, it’s printed out and each page is drawn by hand on paper with pencils and charcoal and that’s very labor-intensive and something that we wouldn’t have had the experience or the budget to do prior to this. That was probably the biggest change that we had those really immersive rollercoaster ride running through the forest scenes that I think were a departure from anything we’d done before.
Ross Stewart: In terms of the color palette though, just one thing I’m sure if anyone had seen “Song of the Sea,” they’d noticed that there was a blue color palette through it, and “Secret of Kells” is very green. We kind of wanted this one to have an orange color palette, and it’s set in autumn with autumn leaves everywhere and then Mebh and Moll both have bright orange hair. Orange became like the kind of dominant theme throughout, encouraging all the color background artists to reference Irish landscapes and Irish forest scenes and it kind of helps accentuate that too.
The Playlist: You referenced the sequences that are through the eyes of the wolves. Were those the hardest for you to pull off?
Tomm Moore: They were the ones that Ross and I didn’t fully know how we were going to do. We got Evan McNamara, who’s a director and animator in Dublin that we did. He does everything from like paint on glass to cook paper, and traditional media, but he’s not afraid of using digital tricks to help them get there. We knew he was kind of a problem solver and that we needed to help us figure that out. He figured out a pipeline that was pretty labor-intensive and pretty innovative that we were excited about like we were saying. It took him a while to crack how he was going to even do it. And it was a lot of research that Ross and I had done that and formed it, about how wolves and canines and lupines or whatever see the world, kind of with limited color palette, but their sense of smell and hearing is so much more acute than ours. Trying to translate that experience into a visual effect was tricky. But, once I haven’t had it figured out it was just a lot, a lot of work, cause every single frame had to be rendered on paper by hand. We had a small team of artists who were doing that for about two years of the production. That was only three minutes of the movie, so it gives you an idea of how much work went into just those sequences.
The Playlist: I think one of the great things about the film too, is the vocal performances of the two lead girls.
Tomm Moore: An eight-year-old and a twelve-year-old, yeah.
The Playlist: Was that easier or harder than you thought it would be?
Tomm Moore: I’ve been lucky that in all three movies that I’ve directed or co-directed we find children to play the parts because I know it can be really successful. You can find a good adult actor who can do a child’s voice, and it’s easier to direct them, but I think there’s something more authentic about getting real kids. We were a bit nervous especially we had a good casting director, Louise Kiely, who went out into all the drama schools and agencies in England and Ireland and got audition tapes first to go through. I think in England, we were fairly quick to find Honor Kneafsey. She’s pretty experienced and already a fairly professional young actor, even though she was only 12. Eva [Whittaker] was brand new to animation and acting all together. She was only eight when we first met her. We worked with her and coached her a little bit, but she’s such a natural talent. It was just a pleasure to work with her and so magical because the character really came alive when we found her. She probably was only a baby when we first started coming up with the stories so it’s crazy to think that.
The Playlist: I read that you guys were still finishing the film when the stay-at-home, lockdown orders hit because of COVID. How much did that affect your production schedule?
Tom Moore: Wasn’t too bad actually, well, it’s only a month or so delayed, wasn’t it?
Ross Stewart: Yeah, the schedule wasn’t affected too badly because it came at a really kind of, well, I suppose the best time that we could have hoped for. It’s never a perfect time, but we were just wrapping up effects animation on the final stages of animation [with] our co-partner studios. There was really compositing left to do and the compositing artists kind of work just at their workstation. It just meant that they were working in their bedrooms instead of that their workstation in the studio. We got all the music recorded, just, I think two weeks before lockdown happened, which was perfect timing too, because we wouldn’t have been able to get all those musicians in the one room if it had been a little bit later. The sound design and grading and everything, we went over to Paris for that. The only thing that really affected was Aurora’s re-recording of the song. We had to do that over zoom, Tom and myself were hoping to get to meet her.
The Playlist: This movie will no doubt look gorgeous on the big screen wherever anyone can see it in that manner. But it will potentially be seen by more people than your previous films when it debuts on Apple TV+ worldwide. Is there a silver lining to that?
Tomm Moore: It’s been disappointing, but we always knew that there’d be a limited release. It’s already gone in cinemas in Japan. And I think Norway and that we had about a weekend in the UK before they shut down again. Where we can show it, we’re showing it in cinemas, and we’ll have a long life, it might get another shock in the festival circuit next year. But realistically, we always knew that most people outside the big cities who are into animation and don’t go to art house cinemas are going to see it on Apple. Right from the time we did the deal with Apple early in production, we kind of knew that most people would see it like that. Our only request is that people don’t watch it on their phone. If they can watch it on a good TV, that would be great, headphones or something,
The Playlist: You mentioned that “Wolfwalkers” is the third chapter of a trilogy. Is the idea to continue and make a fourth film in his vein or are you guys going to go and make something utterly and completely different?
Tomm Moore: Maybe not utterly, completely different, but I think each of us will probably if we come back into animation features in this way we’ll probably be going in different directions. Yeah.
Ross Stewart: I think it might be nice to explore a different demographic maybe. We’re not closing the door on Irish folk tales. There’s such a rich deep well to draw from there. I think there’s many more stories to be told, but it might not be shape-shifting. It might not be like a child protagonist. It might not be for that demographic. It might be something a little bit older, maybe a bit darker. Personally, I’m going to take a year off to just go and paint and maybe do some kids’ book illustrations and just take a breather from animation. But, I’m sure when I come back, there’ll be some really great stories to get stuck into.
“Wolfwalkers” is currently in theaters and debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday
