The Breadwinner

Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner is the third Cartoon Saloon feature, after The Secret of Kells (2009, Twomey co-directed with Tomm Moore) and Song of the Sea (2014). It earned an Academy Award nomination 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 the executive producer, having read Deborah Ellis' 2000 source novel of the same name and approached Cartoon Saloon directly.

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

The film is structured around a frame story in which the protagonist tells a fairy tale to her younger brother; that fairy tale is rendered in a separate cut-paper-puppet style, while the contemporary Kabul material is in the more conventional Cartoon Saloon hand-drawn register. The mixing of two visual styles within a single feature has since been imitated in multiple subsequent international animations. The film is widely cited alongside Persepolis and Wadjda as one of the major works of cinema directly engaging with the experience of girlhood under religious-fundamentalist regimes.