The Secret of Kells · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A wall goes up in a handful of pictures. Stone laid on stone, seasons turning at the edge of the frame, the grey grid climbing until it fills the shot. Years pass in well under a minute and nothing in the ordinary dramatic sense happens. Abbot Cellach has given his life to this thing. It will not work.

The other object in the film is a book small enough to carry under one arm. That is the whole argument, and Tomm Moore makes it almost entirely in shapes: the abbey square, grey, gridded, vertical; the forest round, green, spiralling, horizontal; a boy walking from one geometry into the other.

Deleuze begins his cinema books not with stories but with a question about how movement gets thought, and he borrows the split from Bergson. One way is ancient. You understand movement through poses, through the significant attitudes a body passes through, the forms that stand in for the whole action. The discus thrower. The lament. Deleuze calls these privileged instants. The other way is modern and mechanical: slice movement into equal helpings, none of them special, run them past the eye. Any-instant-whatever. Cinema, on this account, is the machine built to do the second thing, and Deleuze explicitly lets drawn animation in on those grounds. A cartoon, he says, gives us not a figure caught at one unique moment but a figure continuously being described by moving lines.

Then Kells does something strange. It animates, and it thinks in poses.

Look at how anything is staged. Figures stand in profile or dead-on against flat grounds. There is no vanishing point except as a joke or a threat, and no attempt anywhere to simulate volume. Performance comes from silhouette, posture and graphic distortion rather than from faces doing naturalistic work. Every composition wants to be looked at as a shape, not passed through on the way to the next one. This is why the common complaint about the film (characters are functions, Aisling is a presence rather than a person) misses what it is doing. In a regime of privileged instants, characters are attitudes. That is not thin writing. It is the manuscript's idea of a body, kept.

Deleuze's first technical term is the frame, the cadre: a closed set, and one that carries information, so that an image is read as much as seen. Kells pushes that to its limit. Arches, doorways, windows, roundels, borders, a circle chalked on the ground: the action is nearly always inside something. The screen splits into simultaneous panels so parallel events can sit beside each other instead of alternating in cuts, which is the logic of a manuscript register and not of a movie. By the end, when the Chi Rho page unfolds full-screen and the film becomes the object it has been about, you get something like Deleuze's lectosign, the image that asks to be deciphered instead of simply followed. He found it on the far side of a breakdown, in films where seeing no longer told anyone what to do. Kells arrives at the same place from the opposite direction. Its images were always pages.

The casualty is Deleuze's other term, the shot as mobile section, the camera cutting into the flux so that movement expresses a change in the whole. There is essentially no camera here. The film moves sideways, jumps scale, or holds still. So the work the camera normally does gets handed to colour and to cutting. This is a direct inheritance: René Laloux and Roland Topor built Fantastic Planet so that blue Draags against ochre Oms performed the separation a moving camera would otherwise perform, and abbey-grey against forest-green works identically. Behind that sits the UPA grammar Moore names openly, the Gerald McBoing-Boing principle that space can be stated by graphic adjacency rather than perspective.

Montage then carries the load, and it is ornamental. Transitions are shaped, irises and geometric wipes and forms that unfurl or knot into the next scene, which is Heinz Edelmann's device from Yellow Submarine used as structure rather than as a gag. Graphic matches make the arguments: circles rhyme with circles, the Chi Rho's spirals with the forest's. For Deleuze montage is where a film's sense of the whole lives, and this film's whole is a page. Things sit next to each other and rhyme. That is also why it runs seventy-five minutes and elides whole years. Legends skip.

The raiders are handled by a concept Deleuze took from Eisenstein's crowds: the dividual, a collective rendered as one affective unit. The Vikings are angular near-faceless pictograms in black and blood-red, announced by rhythmic percussion and abstracted roars instead of speech. It solves a real problem, how to show massacre to children, and it produces a formal consequence worth naming. They never become individuals, so they cannot be an opponent in the usual sense. They are weather. The silhouette-as-complete-performance system goes back to Lotte Reiniger's Prince Achmed, where intent is legible from an outline alone, and the film uses that same register for the wolves and for Aisling's transformations.

Crom Cruach gets the boldest passage: white line on black, coiling, barely representational. A monster made of drawing. Deleuze's account of expressionism, following Worringer, turns on the non-organic life of things, a line that does not imitate a living body but has a savage life of its own. Northern interlace is one of the historical sources of that idea, so the film's pagan god is its own ornament turned hostile. What Brendan brings back from it is an eye, a lens for seeing finely, in a film where the abbot's failure is that he has stopped looking at anything but his defences and where Aisling's name is the Irish word for vision. (Deleuze's famous later concept is the crystal-image. This film has a crystal in it. The two have nothing to do with each other, and pretending otherwise is the move that makes theory feel like a con.)

Narratively the scaffolding is unhidden and Proppian, which puts it in the large form of the action-image: an encompassing situation presses down until a decisive act transforms it. Cellach offers the correct version of that act, the strongest wall in Ireland, force answering force, grief converted into masonry. It fails, the abbey burns, the mentor dies offscreen, the forest is destroyed. The act that counts is a boy finishing a page. Tarkovsky built Andrei Rublev on this exact shape, the artisan under invasion, the sacred object withheld until it erupts at the end into colour the film has denied itself. Kells performs that manoeuvre in seventy-five minutes, for children, and ends in gold rather than in triumph.

What it did to the art is easy to state and was not obvious in 2009. It used Flash, Illustrator and After Effects, tools associated with cheap television, to defeat depth instead of manufacturing it, and so proved that digital 2D was a style rather than a compromise. It went to the Oscars against Up, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Princess and the Frog in the season when American hand-drawn animation was being buried, and made flatness look like a choice. It was GKIDS' first release, which built the pipeline that has carried a dozen international animated features into the race since. It made Cartoon Saloon, and Song of the Sea, The Breadwinner and Wolfwalkers all follow from it. Its vocabulary got absorbed everywhere by illustrators and independent animators, which is the right fate for a film about a manuscript, since the whole point of a manuscript is that someone copies it.

Watch it again for the borders. Nearly every image is held inside something, and the film's deepest conviction is that a line drawn around a thing can protect it. The wall is that conviction at its largest and it fails. The page is the same conviction at its smallest and it survives, along with a white cat named for a ninth-century poem in which a monk compares his hunt for meaning to his cat's hunt for mice. The film never quite says what the difference is between an enclosure that shuts the world out and one that holds something in. It just draws both, and lets you look.