The Secret of Kells

Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 82nd Academy Awards in March 2010 — the first ever Oscar nomination for an Irish-produced animated feature and the moment that established Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny-based studio Moore had co-founded with Paul Young and Nora Twomey, as a serious force in international animation.

The film is the first of Moore's Irish-folklore trilogy that would continue with Song of the Sea (2014) and Wolfwalkers (2020); all three earned Cartoon Saloon Oscar nominations in the same category. Moore co-directed The Secret of Kells with Nora Twomey, who would go on to direct the Cartoon Saloon feature The Breadwinner (2017), the studio's fourth Oscar-nominated production. The screenplay is by Moore with Fabrice Ziolkowski.

The film is built around the actual Book of Kells, the ninth-century Latin gospel manuscript held at Trinity College Dublin and considered one of the most significant illuminated manuscripts in European cultural history. The visual style is directly drawn from the Insular and Hiberno-Saxon illustration tradition of the manuscript itself, with deliberately flat compositions, decorative cursive linework and ornamental Celtic knotwork as background patterning. The score is by Bruno Coulais, who had also scored Henry Selick's Coraline the same year, with songs from the Irish trad-folk group Kíla. The film was acquired for U.S. distribution by GKIDS — the company's first major release — and led directly to GKIDS becoming the most prominent international art-house animation distributor of the following decade.