WOLFWALKERS: Discovering Friendship Across Lines of Difference - Jasmin Pittman Morrell

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to sit down and chat with Tomm Moore, director of the 2020 animated, fantasy-adventure film, Wolfwalkers. Set in 1650s Ireland, Wolfwalkers explores the connections between colonization, religion, and ecological crisis through a story of unlikely friendship. When Robyn Goodfellowe, a young, English, apprentice hunter, meets Mebh Óg MacTíre, one of the last “wolfwalkers,” the encounter leaves both girls’ lives forever changed. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, Wolfwalkers is lush and lyrical, a pure pleasure to behold. Find it on Apple TV+ and check out my conversation with Moore below.

Jasmin Pittman Morrell: What myths and history does Wolfwalkers draw upon?

Tomm Moore: The stories go back before the English occupation. It was around the time of St. Patrick when there were these stories of people who could transform into wolves. The idea was that St. Patrick had put a curse on the people who wouldn’t convert, and they were howling in the woods. When they fell asleep, a wolf would leave their body. They ended up becoming these intermediary people that lived between “civilization” and the forest. We thought those stories were nice, and they come from this region here in Kilkenny where I grew up.

The history is the start of the colonization proper when Cromwell came over and decided he’d wipe out all the wolves and clear out the forests in order to symbolically tame the country. So, we had the idea that if we set it during that time period that we could explore the idea of the pre-Christian indigenous Irish and a little English girl, and they would be friends despite the fact that they were not supposed to be. That was the core of it. It was just the idea that they wouldn’t see their differences, but only see each other’s similarities, ultimately. 

JPM: Walk me through the conception of the idea to the final product of the film. What kinds of craft and narrative choices do you have to make? (I know it’s a big question!).

TM: Huge. It is a big question. The very first idea was Ross [Stewart] and I speaking about it over lunch, and we made a little notebook. Ross made a note about the idea. And then it was sketches and drawings and figuring out the characters. We started working with the screenwriter, Will Collins and did various drafts and animation tests. The very first idea, Robyn was a little boy, and after draft or two we realized it was much stronger if it was a little girl. The conflict was much stronger, and the friendship was more interesting. 

Then at a certain point we started finding actors to play the parts. We had Sean Bean in mind right from the start when we were designing the characters. We need a little girl from the North of England to play the part. We wanted to have the same accent. Actually, Honor [Kneafsey] isn’t from the North of England, but she does a good impersonation (she’s from Cambridge). And we found Eva Whittaker to play Mebh. We recorded the dialogue and some rough storyboards. And then the story changed. It was a long journey. 

I’d say it was about a year and eight months of rewriting storyboards and re-recording the voices until we felt it was ready to go to animation. And then it was about 24 months—that’s the really intense part—when over 100 people are working on it. The background team is painting the backgrounds and a team of animators drawing the characters. At the very end, we record the music, and we record the sound effects. That was done last July. That’s it in a nutshell. 

JPM: This film felt so rich in metaphor. It seemed to me the animation style helped carry that. There were times when Mebh’s hair seemed to echo the lines of the trees [which reminded me of the connection between Mebh and the land]. Do you want to speak to that?

TM: Yeah, some of it is just built into the medium. Animation is about transformation. It’s transforming all the time, and the story is about transformation. So that naturally fed into it. The shape language was a big metaphor we used. Very geometric, very hard lines to show the people in the town who were kind of uptight and had rigid views. And we used loose sketchy lines and big curvy shapes for the forest. And we designed the characters like Maebh and Robyn so they could go on a journey. More so Robyn who starts off in a little hunting costume that’s all angles. Her hair is in a braid, but by the end of the movie she’s become much more flowing and organic like Mebh. In the way we drew Robyn, we could see her change. When she tried to fit into society again, she put on a bonnet and everything became hard lines. But when she was with Mebh, she got leaves in her hair and her hair got messy.

JPM: Just one last question. What do you hope that people take away from watching Wolfwalkers?

TM: The big one is the friendship. The kids are so different—from different backgrounds—and they’re able to be friends. There’s empathy there between humans and other humans. Humans and other species.

The other one is the ecological theme. We lose so much when we lose the forest. Our connection to nature is so important. Those are the big ones. 

But I just hope they enjoy it. I think a lot of people are finding the relationship between Robyn and Mebh to be inspiring, so I’m really happy about that. 

Jasmin Pittman Morrell is the co-editor of The Porch Magazine. You can also find her writing featured in The Bitter Southerner and Meeting At The Table: African-American Women Write On Race, Culture and Community (2020). When she’s not surrounded by words, she’s probably getting lost in the woods

*Photo by Apple TV+