The Breadwinner

Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner is the third Cartoon Saloon feature, after The Secret of Kells (2009, which Twomey co-directed with Tomm Moore) and Song of the Sea (2014). It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018 and won the Annie Award for Best Independent Animated Feature the same year. Angelina Jolie was executive producer: she had read Deborah Ellis' 2000 novel of the same name and approached Cartoon Saloon directly.

Anita Doron, an Iranian-Canadian writer, wrote the screenplay in close collaboration with Ellis herself. The voice cast includes Saara Chaudry, Soma Bhatia, Laara Sadiq, Shaista Latif and Ali Badshah, with Jolie's own daughter Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt in a small supporting role. The hand-drawn 2D animation was done at the Cartoon Saloon studios in Kilkenny, Ireland and at Aircraft Pictures in Toronto, with additional animation produced in Luxembourg.

The film is built around a frame story in which the girl tells a fairy tale to her younger brother. That tale is rendered in a separate cut-paper-puppet style, while the Kabul material uses Cartoon Saloon's more familiar hand-drawn look, and the mix of two visual styles in one feature has since been picked up by a number of other international animated films. We would put it beside Persepolis and Wadjda among the major films about girlhood under religious-fundamentalist rule.