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. It was the first Oscar nomination ever for an Irish-produced animated feature, and it established Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny-based studio Moore had co-founded with Paul Young and Nora Twomey, as a serious force in international animation.

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

At the centre of the story is the real Book of Kells, the ninth-century Latin gospel manuscript held at Trinity College Dublin and one of the most important illuminated manuscripts in European cultural history. The visual style comes straight from the Insular and Hiberno-Saxon tradition of the manuscript itself: deliberately flat compositions, decorative cursive linework and ornamental Celtic knotwork used as background patterning. Bruno Coulais, who also scored Henry Selick's Coraline that year, wrote the music, with songs from the Irish trad-folk group Kíla. GKIDS acquired the film for U.S. distribution as the company's first major release, and its success led directly to GKIDS becoming the most prominent international art-house animation distributor of the following decade.