Wolfwalkers

Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart's Wolfwalkers was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards in April 2021, and won both the Annie Award for Best Independent Animated Feature and the European Film Award for Best Animated Film, a rare spread of top European, Academy and Annie recognition in animation in a single season. It was Cartoon Saloon's third feature in a row to receive an Academy Award nomination, after The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014); the only other film in the Cartoon Saloon catalogue made in that stretch was The Breadwinner (2017).

It closes Tomm Moore's loose Irish folklore trilogy. The earlier films drew on the Iona-Kells manuscript tradition (The Secret of Kells) and the selkie folktale of the Atlantic-Irish coast (Song of the Sea); Wolfwalkers takes the Irish wolf legend and the wider European werewolf tradition, and its title is Moore's own coinage, not a translation of an existing folkloric term. Will Collins wrote the screenplay.

Honor Kneafsey voices the young English protagonist and Eva Whittaker plays Mebh, the wild Irish girl at the centre, with Sean Bean and Simon McBurney in the principal adult roles. The production used far more 2D hand-drawn animation than is usual in twenty-first-century commercial animation, and many sequences are drawn in a deliberately woodcut-influenced line taken from the Insular illuminated-manuscript tradition. Bruno Coulais, who scored the two earlier films of the trilogy, wrote the music with the Irish trad-folk band Kíla. Apple TV+ acquired the film for global distribution and released it in late 2020 alongside a small theatrical run.