Hacker Cinema
The Secret of Kells
2009 · Film · 79 min
Directed by Tomm Moore
Adventure awaits 12 year old Brendan who must fight Vikings and a serpent god to find a crystal and complete the legendary Book of Kells. In order to finish Brother Aiden's book, Brendan must overcome his deepest fears on a secret quest that will take him beyond the abbey walls and into the enchanted forest where dangerous mythical creatures hide. Will Brendan succeed in his quest?
7 positive1 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
One thing I like about The Secret of Kells is some of a meta-joke: since the plot takes place in the Middle Ages, and perspective was not yet in fashion, there's no perspective at all in this movie. It's very in your face (just like the Wes Anderson's lateral tracking shots), but just as charming.
The animated film 'The Secret of Kells' is great and well worth a watch. Far more accessible/relatable to modern audiences than this historical Bible that was dug up in a field in Kells. I'm glad it got a mention but the other guy is right -- the link should have been to the digitized book.
Are you talking about made for TV animation or others? I would suggest animated feature films such as The Secret of Kells, A Scanner Darkly, or even Waking Life and Heavy Metal to see that this is not entirely the case.
There is a wonderful animated film called The Secret of Kells inspired by this book. It has the most beautiful animation style of any movie I have ever seen, I think. Highly recommended it just for the artwork.
I wouldn't call that time wasted, I think it's usually very important to create an atmosphere, and to better understand the world that the people we're watching are living in. I've never watched Secret of Kells so I can't comment on that.
But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. The original Stay Night by DEEN was a weird mix of all three routes, not great by any means but at least brought something new, UBW was butchered, and I'm trying to keep things civil so I won't talk about Heaven's Feel. Zero had the same treatment, most of the internal dialogue of characters was cut, leaving a story with half-baked characters and trying to compensate with the visuals.
> So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
That's true. However, I think time is not always a hard limit. Sometimes the movie being slow is part of the experience. It is something I like a lot, so I probably have a bias here.
> I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary
I agree that its largely ignorable. Actually, the "technobabble" adds a lot of flavor and "coolness" to a lot of situations, so its fine for my reptilian brain.
The issue is that every minute of technobabble on the screen is another wasted minute from a storytelling perspective. When you watch a denser film (like Secret of Kells), that's lacking any of that techno-babble... or even something like Fate/Stay (which largely cuts out the techno-magic babble aside from a few key phrases), the storyline is heavier and denser. More things "happen" because there's less "filler technobabble" going on.
So when we talk about pleasing my "higher-order" brain (as opposed to my reptile brain which is pleased with the technobabble + explosions), my high-order brain enjoys the character interactions and the deeper analogies to the human condition.
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So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
Good animated movies / cartoons can be more deep and existential than live-action, much like how a Picasso painting can more deeply reveal the secrets of shapes than many photographs.
I don't think Kung Fu Panda is particularly deep, but probably is deeper than a lot of other Hollywood films. I'd say the deeper animated films I've seen are Secret of Kells (largely an adventure story, but very in depth with regards to dark-age Irish history/legends/mythology).
There are a lot of in-depth Anime movies, hard to pick anything in particular that stands out. Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children, probably affected me emotionally the most (despite being mostly mundane situations). I think a lot of the more sci-fi / dream / supernatural stuff loses points due to technobabble (Ghost in a Shell, Evangelion, Paprika), but these are also deeper movies than typical.
Tokyo Godfathers / Wolf children manage to be deep about a relatively mundane subject. Homeless people for Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children is basically a simple "raising a young girl / young boy" story, with the wolf-myth just largely representing the uncertainty that all mothers face when raising kids for the first time. Despite being about mundane subjects with only the barest of myth/sci-fi/fantasy in it, these movies seem to discuss the human condition better than many other films (even contrasted to other anime films, like Evangeleon)
The Secret of Kells is a beautiful animated film. It was nominated for an oscar but lost to Up that year.
Fascinating - it's interesting that commentary seemed so common in these old texts, and it's cool to see how decorative graphical elements were often "first-class citizens" on the page.
When every codex was a bespoke item, I guess it made more sense. If you're interested in that sort of thing, check out the Book of Kells:
http://codex99.com/typography/37.html
There's also a great animated movie about the relic, called The Secret of Kells.