Review: Cartoon Saloon at 25 – The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon + Q&A

The month of January marked the celebration of a milestone anniversary at the BFI Southbank in London with “Cartoon Saloon at 25”, a season dedicated to the Kilkenny studio. The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon, also part of the London Short Film Festival 2024, showcased eight shorts by many of the key figures of the studio. The programme exhibited a great stylistic variety, while also displaying a coherence with the feature films and engagement with complex themes. This was followed by a Q&A with Cartoon Saloon founders and creative directors Nora Twomey, Paul Young, and Tomm Moore hosted by Michael Leader (curator of Ghiblioteque).

From Darkness (Nora Twomey, 2002).

Fig. 1 - Cúilín Dualach (Nora Twomey, 2004).

From Darkness (Nora Twomey, 2002) kicked off the programme in chronological order. Inspired by an Inuit folktale, the short opens with a woman’s body thrown into the freezing sea as a punishment. Her spirit comes to hunt the waters for years, until a fisherman brings her skeleton back to the surface and tenderly tends to her, bringing her back to life. The collaborative ethos of the studio is evidenced by the multiple roles covered by key figures: Twomey as director and artistic director, alongside frequent collaborators Michael McGrath and Jeremy Purcell; Moore as one of the animators and character designers; Young as producer and sound designer. The result is the signature hand-drawn, 2D style that anticipates The Secret of the Kells (Nora Twomey and Tomm Moore, 2009) and Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore, 2015), as well as their investment in folklore. However, such style was still a work-in-progress, tied to the rigour and time management required by working to deadline. As Twomey recalled in the Q&A, although not fully satisfied with the result, she had to submit the short to the Galway Film Festival. This is perhaps especially evident in the shots of the roughly sketched and coloured skeleton in the hut, with prominent, hollow eye sockets like an etching. Twomey underlined the importance of this experience for her own creative process, learning to let go and helping her in managing larger projects and teams of people.

Cúilín Dualach (Nora Twomey, 2004) departs from the more familiar style, with the characters in acid colours against an often monochromatic background and more angular drawings. The comedic tone of the film soon emerges as, what appear to be verdant hills, are revealed to be the knees of a woman in labour (Fig. 1), who perpetually wears a pair of yellow Marigolds. The baby, Cúilín, is born with his head backwards. Through his voice-over in Gaelic, he guides us from his infancy to his teen years, as he finds his passion in swimming and tries to gain the affections of his father, unable to accept him since birth. Despite the light tone, the short does not shy away from darker undertones as it deals with discrimination and bullism, to which Cúilín is subjected by society.

Old Fangs (Adrian Merigeau, 2009).

The darker side of childhood is again central in Old Fangs (Adrian Merigeau, 2009). The story follows a young Wolf as he returns to his childhood home to face the confusing memories of his younger years. There, he finds his father, a Satan-like presence, who overwhelms the domestic space with his large shoulders and growling voice. Chain-smoking and heavily drinking, he shows little tenderness towards the son, driving him away. The short mixes pixilation of autumnal leaves with hand-drawn animation of the forest and characters, which flattens them against the background, and cleverly shifts to a squared frame-within-the-frame to depict the traumatic memories of abuse experienced by the young Wolf and his mother, as if this submerged memory were a film.

Difficult family dynamics are reprised in Somewhere Down the Line (Julien Regnard, 2014), which combines 3D and 2D animation techniques. The short chronicles the cyclical nature of life through the various seasons of a man’s life on the road, literalised in the landscape. The car is the only constant, from his childhood, when he witnesses a violent argument between his parents from the backseat; to fatherhood, as he repeats his parents’ mistakes, alienating his wife and daughter; to his old age, rekindling his relationship with his daughter in another car.

Fig. 2 - The Ledge End of Phil (Paul Ó Muiris, 2014).

Fig. 3 - Late Afternoon (Louise Bagnall, 2017).

The Ledge End of Phil (Paul Ó Muiris, 2014) provides comedic relief. Accountant Phil finds himself stuck on the ledge of a building and can only hope in the help of a baby seagull to get out of this sticky situation. The character design lends itself to slapstick comedy, making good use of the plasmatic qualities of the medium (Eisenstein 1986). Phil is tall and gangly, his mouth enlarging in scared grimaces, while the arms fling in the air at various points with uncommon elasticity. The short and round bird shares with him the ability to stretch and compress, particularly evident as he is tossed around by the strong stream of air coming from fan (Fig. 2). Ultimately, the short celebrates the freeing potentialities of the medium, akin to the flight that Phil and the seagull take at the end.

The true gem of the programme is Late Afternoon (Louise Bagnall, 2017), nominated for a Best Animation Short Oscar in 2019. Bagnall returns to a hand-drawn style coloured in soft pastels to tell the story of Emily, an old lady affected by Alzheimer’s who seamlessly swims through various temporalities, while her daughter Kate packs a lifetime of memories around her. Like Old Fangs and Somewhere Down the Line, the film deals with a complex theme, but leaves the darkness behind to bask in the glow of the luminescent dots of colours that envelop Emily as she slips between past and present, each one linked to a significant object from her memories, like the bright orange of the dress she used to wear as a little girl (Fig. 3). Emily’s life is thus depicted as a synaesthetic whirlwind where different temporalities coalesce in her body, young and old at once, in a moving portrait that culminates in a moment of recognition and the hug between mother and daughter.

There’s a Monster in My Kitchen (Tomm Moore and Fabian Erlinghäuser, 2020).

Produced during the Covid pandemic by a team of animators working remotely and sponsored by Greenpeace, There’s a Monster in My Kitchen (Tomm Moore and Fabian Erlinghäuser, 2020) focuses on the destruction of the Amazon forest caused by the “evil empire”. This 2’-short shares with Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, 2020) a similar style, thanks to the same creative team, and theme. While the feature film highlighted the close connection between British colonialism and environmental destruction in the past, the short emphasises the responsibility of neo-colonialism and a rampant global economy in the current climate emergency.

The final short, Screecher’s Reach (Paul Young, 2023), is part of the animated anthology Star Wars: Visions and has recently won a Creative Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation Production Design. It follows a young girl who battles a Banshee-like figure, not that dissimilar from the skeleton in From Darkness in its character design. Screecher’s Reach represents a sum of 25 years of production, as discussed in the Q&A, which re-traced the history of the studio and its production practices. As Moore and Young declared, the short is exemplary of the studio’s current experimentation with new technologies while also remaining rooted in the signature hand-drawn style. Whereas the character design was completely done by hand by a team of animators and later digitalised, the landscape was directly created through digital technology (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 - The Q&A with Nora Twomey, Paul Young, and Tomm Moore, hosted by Michael Leader.

In another highlight of the Q&A, Twomey and Moore also recalled the very beginnings of the studio: the three creative directors met at Ballyfermot College of Higher Education in Dublin, where many others of their frequent collaborators (e.g., Louise Bagnall, Michael McGrath) also studied classic animation, often using Moore’s kitchen as a headquarter for their projects. Twomey emphasised the importance of these long-lasting partnerships while also discussing the creative influence of new animators, who may work in the background for the feature films, but find a good medium to experiment with their own style in the shorts.

The Q&A concluded with the anticipation of some future projects, including a new feature film from Moore, an apt and promising ending for an event that gave the audience the opportunity to see these rarely-screened and yet valuable works that encapsulate the first 25 years of the studio with their style, themes, and modes of production. Here’s to 25 and many more years!

**Article published: February 3, 2024**  

References

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1986. Eisenstein on Disney. Trans. Jay Leyda, London: Methuen.

Biography

Eleonora Sammartino is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on contemporary Hollywood cinema and media, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between popular culture, genre, and gender politics. She has published on gender politics and the musical in the European Journal of American Studies and the collections Musicals at the Margins (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). She has also written about postcolonial identity on Italian TV for the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and has co-edited (with Alice Guilluy) a special issue of Celebrity Studies dedicated to Hugh Grant.