Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2009

The Contenders:

Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up (winner)

The Secret of Kells

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sometimes you find something that you really didn’t expect. Such was the case with The Secret of Kells for me. I’ve been trying to knock out animated films pretty regularly, since that’s an area where I have regularly been lax on this blog, and it just happened that this film is currently streaming. I expected pretty much standard animated fare. What I got instead was the sort of eye-opening film experience I had watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This is not a film that you watch for the story, although the story is very good. This is a film to experience for the gorgeous artwork.

It doesn’t look like this at first. In fact, the animation looks initially rather rudimentary and old, not at all like the three-dimensional work of modern animation. It’s disconcerting at first, and then the reality dawns: the animation is specifically designed to look like an ancient illuminated manuscript. Original story author and co-director Tomm Moore said that after seeing the culturally-inspired artwork of Mulan, he wanted to do something similar with Irish heritage and art. The result is a film that is uniquely gorgeous. To do this, he used a fictionalized account of a fictional version of the Book of Kells, and illuminated manuscript of the four gospels, something considered one of Ireland’s greatest cultural relics.