Wolfwalkers

Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart's Wolfwalkers earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards in April 2021, won the Annie Award for Best Independent Animated Feature, and won the European Film Award for Best Animated Film — the rare case in which a single property won the top European, Academy and Annie recognitions in animation in a single season. It is 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) — only The Breadwinner (2017) was made between them in the Cartoon Saloon catalogue.

The film closes Tomm Moore's loose Irish folklore trilogy. Where the earlier films had drawn on the Iona-Kells manuscript tradition (in The Secret of Kells) and the selkie folktale of the Atlantic-Irish coast (in Song of the Sea), Wolfwalkers draws on the Irish wolf legend and on the wider European werewolf tradition; the title is Moore's own coinage rather than a direct translation of an existing folkloric term. The screenplay is by Will Collins.

The voice cast pairs Honor Kneafsey (the young English protagonist) with Eva Whittaker as Mebh, the central wild Irish girl, and Sean Bean and Simon McBurney in the principal adult roles. The production used substantially more 2D hand-drawn animation than is conventional in twenty-first-century commercial animation; many sequences are rendered in deliberately woodcut-influenced linework drawn from the Insular illuminated-manuscript tradition. The score is by Bruno Coulais (also the composer for the earlier two trilogy films) and Kíla, the Irish trad-folk band. The film was acquired by Apple TV+ for global distribution and released on the streamer in late 2020 in conjunction with a small theatrical run.