This movie is beyond gorgeous. I'd recommend it even if the story was complete garbage (it isn't) because it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. I feel like I should let that speak for itself, so I'm just going to post a bunch of screenshots, and if that doesn't convince you then I guess I'll ramble about how much I loved it for a bit.
OK, that's probably enough....or maybe too many. Whatever, I don't care. I could just stare at screenshots from this movie all day, it's so beautiful.
So The Secret of Kells is a fictional version of the creation of The Book of Kells which is an illuminated manuscript from around the 9th century (I've been to see it in the Trinity College library and it is amazing). The main character is Brendan, a resident of Kells monastry. His uncle, the abbot Cellach is obsessed with building a wall to protect the monastery from viking raids, but Brendan is more interested in assisting Aidan of Iona, a master illuminator, with his work on an amazing book that will "turn darkness into light", and exploring the world outside the monastery with his new friend, the forest spirit Aisling.
This film reminded me a lot of Hayao Miyazaki's animation, and there are a lot of parallels with Princess Mononoke - wild girl lives in the forest with a bunch of wolves, conflict between nature and the modern world, threat of attack from barbarians etc etc. Moore even names Miyazaki as an influence in this interview, where he also mentions Samurai Jack which I love. I also love fairytales, folklore, mythology....all that jazz, so obviously this film was right up my street. I find Celtic folklore really interesting, but it's really not all that prevalent in popular culture, especially compared to say, Greek mythology, so it's really nice to see something this lovely and accessible about Irish legends.
I'm not going to go on and on about all the various influences and cool things about this film, I feel like the screenshots pretty much speak for themselves, so all I'll say is: WATCH IT NOW!
