Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Wolfwalkers
2020 · Tomm Moore · Wolfwalkers on Sightlines
Look at the trees before you look at what happens in them. Out in the wood past Kilkenny, the drawings aren't finished. The pencil still shows under the paint, the loose searching strokes an animator normally cleans off before anyone sees a frame, left in on purpose. Then look at the town. Woodcut crosshatching. Hard verticals. Right angles, cages, a wall. Two ways of making a line, and the whole film lives in the difference between them.
That is what Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart invented here, and it's worth saying plainly: they put the argument into the drawing instead of the dialogue. A child who has never heard the word colonial still feels the town squeeze and the wood breathe, because the marks do it.
Deleuze gives us a useful name for the town. He called the frame a closed set: a box holding a certain quantity of information, where the real question is always how tightly it's shut and what it opens onto. Kilkenny may be the most literal closed set anyone has drawn. Everything in it is squared, ruled, walled, complete. The wood is the opposite, and Deleuze had a name for that too, borrowed from Bergson: the Open, the whole that is never given because it is still changing. Those unerased pencil lines aren't a charming texture. They are the film's claim about power. A finished image can be counted, mapped, and destroyed. The wood can't be exterminated because it hasn't been finished.
Here film theory does us a favour. Deleuze wrote almost nothing about animation, but what he did write, early in Cinema 1, is that the cartoon belongs to the movement-image because its drawn line gives you not a pose but a form in the course of being formed — the any-instant-whatever, motion caught at no privileged moment. Wolfwalkers takes that throwaway observation and makes it the subject. Bazin founded his realism on the photograph's debt to the thing in front of the lens. A drawing owes no such debt, and this film spends that freedom instead of apologising for it.
Which is how the movie you expect gets set up and then defected from. The father's commission is a textbook action-image in what Deleuze called its large form: a global situation presses (the wolves must go, the land must be tamed), a man acts, the situation is transformed. Colonial administration has exactly that shape, which is why empire films and Westerns take it. At its heart sits a binomial, force against force, hunter against wolf. The film hands you that picture in its first minutes and then walks its heroine out of it. She arrives with a crossbow and a target. She leaves as the target.
The exit is drawn, and it is the best thing in the film. When Wolfwalkers drops into wolf-vision, the human eye goes: rushing charcoal and gold, the world rebuilt out of scent and sound radiating as visible form. Deleuze's term for a perception cut loose from any human centre is the gramme, matter perceiving matter, nobody's point of view. Usually that requires a machine seeing without us. Here there is no camera. There is a hand, and a hand can draw a smell. No lens can photograph one. The precedent is Norstein's Hedgehog in the Fog, which made atmosphere into a tangible glowing layer inside the frame; Wolfwalkers takes that discovery and gives it a nose.
Then the stranger thing. A wolfwalker leaves her body while she sleeps. Mebh lies still on the floor and everything that is her is out running with the pack. Deleuze called this the movement of world: the character stops being the one who moves and becomes the one who is moved, the dancer taken over by the dance. He found it in musicals. Nobody expects it in a children's adventure, where movement is supposed to belong to heroes doing things. The most important motion in this film happens to a body that isn't moving. And there is a later idea of Deleuze's, with Guattari, that everyone half-remembers: becoming-animal is not imitating a wolf or turning into one. It is entering a zone where the boundary stops holding. Moore and Stewart don't animate a transformation so much as animate that zone. The line simply goes round.
The debts are specific and honourable. The Secret of Kells built the flattened, illuminated-manuscript picture space where Celtic knotwork and interlace organise the frame, and that is the grammar that lets the forest be swirling linework laid against a grid. Song of the Sea supplied the watercolour, the spiral compositions, and the seal-to-human folklore that is the direct template for this transformation and for the round-against-rigid staging. Princess Mononoke supplied the architecture, forest spirits against an industrial iron-town, and San, the wolf-raised girl who is plainly Mebh's ancestor. Paul Grimault's The King and the Mockingbird supplied the compositional rule itself: tyranny as towering rigid verticals, freedom as rounded and organic. And from its sibling The Tale of the Princess Kaguya comes the visible construction line, the bare paper left bare. Notice what changes in the borrowing. In Takahata the naked charcoal means mortality, a life going past too fast to ink. Here it means something political. Unfinished is ungovernable.
Which brings up the thing running under the adventure. Kilkenny, 1650, Cromwell, drawn by a studio that actually works in Kilkenny. The allegory is the taming of Ireland, its language and its women. Deleuze's late thought about political cinema starts from a hard fact: the people are missing. A colonised people cannot simply be shown, because the showing was part of what unmade it. What such films do instead is fabulate, catching people in the act of legending themselves into existence. An Irish studio making a folklore triptych in the town it draws is doing precisely that. The wolfwalkers are not a surviving nation. There are two of them. The film closes by handing you a myth instead of a restoration, and that is the honest ending, not the soft one.
In 2020 hand-drawn feature animation was supposed to be over. This film made its case by drawing, and the case is that the visible hand is a capacity and not a nostalgia, because a photograph cannot be unfinished and a pencil line can. It was nominated in a year when almost nobody could see it on a screen the size it deserved.
Watch it again for the lines. Track the exact moment each one loosens. Then sit with the question the ending leaves open: the only way out of the closed set is to stop being drawn as human, and the girl does not free Ireland. She leaves it. What is the film telling us that costs?
Concepts in play
- the closed set (cadre) — The Cromwellian town drawn in rigid verticals and woodcut crosshatching, 'all cages and right angles' — a composition treated as a sealed, information-complete system.
- the Open — The forest 'breathes in loose, rounded pencil lines with the construction sketches deliberately left visible, as if the wild refused to be finished' — a whole still changing, never given.
- any-instant-whatever — The visible construction sketches keep the drawn mark present as a form in the course of being formed rather than a posed climactic figure — Deleuze's own account of what the animated line does.
- action-image, large form — The English hunter brought to Ireland to wipe out the last pack: a global situation (wolves as demons, nature as an evil to be tamed) pressing toward a decisive exterminating act.
- binomial — Hunter against wolf, town against wood — the force-against-force duel the film sets up in its premise and then dissolves by turning the hunter's daughter into the quarry.
- engramme / photogramme — The shift into wolf-vision: rushing charcoal-and-gold sequences rendered from scent and sound, a perception with no human centre, 'hand-drawn animation doing something no camera could.'
- movement of world — The wolfwalker 'leaves her body when she sleeps and runs with the pack' — the body lies inert while all motion passes to the world around it.
- story-telling / legending — The closing panel of an Irish folklore triptych made by Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny itself, the town it draws — a studio of national draughtsmanship legending a national past into image.
- people are missing — The 1650 Cromwellian setting and the 'pointed colonial allegory about the taming of Ireland, its language, and its women,' with only two wolfwalkers left where a people should be.