Wolfwalkers was billed as one of the best animated films of the year, but more often than not, it feels like a richly-drawn, immersively-wrought world with little new to say. The folks at Cartoon Saloon have enjoyed critical praise for their previous entrées into the world of animation with instant classics like The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014, director Tomm Moore returns for his third movie).
Girl from colonial oppressor England comes with her dad to help pacify the Wild in an Irish town newly under their control. The Irish townspeople, steeped in pagan cultural practices believe that there’s a sort of detente that was reached between Saint Patrick and the spirits of old, which can only be maintained by studious separation of the Urban and the Natural Worlds.
Walks in Sean Bean, whose sole contribution to mass media in the last fifteen years is to create fully-fleshed out heroes who die before their time and never return to the series. Sean Bean is charged by the Lord Protector with ridding the forest of wolves within two days. He seems pretty bad at this task and preternaturally permissive of his daughter’s antics at home, possibly because they’ve recently lost her mother and he’s trying to be as understanding as he can while they adjust to the move to a new place, but he also seems pretty flattered that she wants to take after his profession. Anyway, the way that he sets bear traps for wolves feels very Fox and the Hound, and maybe it is a cheeky homage, since the traps never really constitute a threat to the much wilier wolves.
There are a couple of things that happen in this movie that are novel and unexpected, but if you are wanting to watch it after all of this summary already, then you should stop here. For those of you continuing onward, I’m really happy with the way in which Robyn becomes a wolfwalker and the way this complicates the plot, although the notion that she has to live the rest of her life perpetually awake like an Avatar simulation feels like nightmare fuel. When you’re asleep you’re a wolf, and when you’re awake you’re a human. Jesus Christ, when do you get to sleep? Can you sleep as a wolf or do you turn into another creature when you’re asleep as a wolf and a human? The second thing I really like about this movie, which appears at first to want to explore the intricacies of colonialism in 17th century Ireland but then actually mostly wants to tell a story about werewolves, is the forest fire at the end. Yes, the wolves are saved, but the pact that’s been struck with the natural world appears to have broken. They’ve killed the Lord Protector (or his emissary? did the actual Lord Protector die in a wolf accident up north?), but surely there are more like him, clambering to pacify the north, and the magical forest that we’ve tried to protect is burnt to a crisp. The wolves have no chance of staying put now. They must move on because there can be no peaceful resolution with the urban world in 1650. What a choice there for a child to swallow.
Some issues. The comparisons made to Miyazaki are not superficial. Obviously, no one movie has a monopoly on telling historical action stories about the clash between the urban and natural/spiritual world featuring a strong female character and her charismatic pack of wolves. Even so, there are more than a few moments when Wolfwalkers appears to take its cues from Mononoke. There are ways in which Mononoke is a lot weirder and poses some dark questions that go unanswered or unresolved in the span of the movie: cannibal gorilla people? what was that about again?
Wolfwalker healing doesn’t appear to have a cost, which fits nicely with this movie’s age designation for 9 and anyone who can’t stomach stakes. Nor does Robyn’s hawk seem to harbor any resentment for being shot carelessly by its owner, or if there is a discussion about it, it’s brief and off camera. The “search” for Maeve’s mother is about as long as it takes for Robyn to walk back to the city, and her mother’s advice leaves a lot to be desire for how a young girl is supposed to inherit the mantle of leadership. The Lord Protector’s death is at once melodramatic and confusing. He appears to have blackmailed a giant wolf into domestication as a PR stunt for the Irish mob that he barely controls, so his hair-brained death doesn’t seem too out of character, but still.
Hard pass on watching this long rehash of a Japanese classic. Fast-forward through the first forty minutes and you’ll be fine.
