Wolfwalkers (2020)

Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart return to the Irish Folklore Trilogy with a hand-drawn tale set in 1650 Kilkenny, where a young apprentice hunter named Robyn Goodfellowe follows her father into the woods to exterminate the last wolf pack. The film places a girl at its center and gives her a female co-lead in Mebh, a feral Wolfwalker child, and the voice cast carries a genuine Irish lilt suited to the setting. This is cultural authenticity as craft, not a casting mandate, and the distinction is worth keeping in mind for the ledger.

The engine of the plot is a Lord Protector who wants to tame nature itself, and he pursues this by burning the forest and erasing the wolves inside it. The environmental argument here is sustained and unmistakable, an anti-deforestation sermon dressed in folklore. The same figure reads as a Cromwell stand-in, an English colonial authority grinding down the native Irish and their wild lands, though the film treats this as history-flavored fantasy instead of a modern reckoning with race. Robyn chafes at scullery duty and demands to hunt like her father. Female agency, a mother-daughter bond, and Mebh's untamed spirit all carry the story, but no thesis gets spoken aloud.

For a film this politically loaded, the restraint is notable. Sympathy for the wild and contempt for authoritarian fear arrive as adventure, not lecture. The villain is a theocrat and a colonizer, which keeps the class warfare angle dormant. There are no LGBTQ+ threads, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characters, and nothing that bends actual history to a contemporary purpose. A handsomely drawn fable with progressive weather and no megaphone. The sort of thing that used to be called a children's movie.