The Secret of Kells (2009)

An illuminated manuscript, a walled abbey, and a small boy who wants to draw. The Secret of Kells arrived in 2009 from Cartoon Saloon, hand-drawn in flat Celtic geometry, and it went on to an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. It is lovely. It is also, by the standards of the ledger we keep here, almost entirely empty.

The scriptorium does offer a modest line item. Brother Tang hails from China, Brother Leonardo from Italy, Brother Assoua from Africa, Brother Square from England, and the abbey treats their presence as ordinary fact, which is roughly how a ninth-century scriptorium would have worked. No character remarks on it. No lesson is extracted. Tomm Moore later expressed regret over the cartoonish design of Brother Assoua and wished he had hired a designer of color, a confession that converts the whole arrangement from statement into accident. Aisling, the forest sprite, has spirit and a voice, and Nora Twomey shares the directing credit, which is a small entry on the feminist page and no more than that.

The remainder of the column sits at zero, and it sits there honestly. The forest is mythological, not ecological. The Vikings are Vikings. Nobody lectures about class, wealth, or the body. Cellach's obsession with the wall reads as grief and pride, not as commentary on anything current. The film tells its story through color and silence, and critics at the time called it refreshingly calm, which is the highest compliment available to a movie with no sermon in it. We are left with a beautiful object and very little to argue about, which is its own kind of relief. Score the thing as you like. It will not mind.