Hacker Cinema
Wolfwalkers
2020 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart
AnimationFamilyAdventureFantasy
In a time of superstition and magic, when wolves are seen as demonic and nature an evil to be tamed, a young apprentice hunter comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack. But when she saves a wild native girl, their friendship leads her to discover the world of the Wolfwalkers and transform her into the very thing her father is tasked to destroy.
6 positive1 negative1 neutralfrom 8 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
8 comments on Hacker News
Add Wolfwalkers to the list. It probably would have won the academy award for Best Animated Feature if that category wasn't a total joke.
(It's a joke category because all Academy members get to vote. There's no requirement that they have seen all the nominees, or that they have seen any of them.
A few years ago some animation trade magazine (I don't remember which one) surveyed Academy members after a year where a movie that most animation professionals thought would easily win lost to a movie they thought was good but clearly not as good.
What they found was that a significant fraction of voters don't watch animation, considering it to be just for kids. If they have young kids they vote for whatever movie the kids watched over and over. If they didn't have young kids they'd ask their young nieces or nephews or grandkids what cartoon they liked that year and vote for it. Or they would vote for the one they remembered seeing ads for).
Check out Wolfwalkers too, is the third movie of the Irish Folklore Trilogy made by Tomm Moore after Song of the Sea
An interesting area I know of where Blender is used professionally is rough animation: such as the French film 'I Lost My Body'; the Irish film 'Wolfwalkers'; and multiple anime, including the recent 'Ranking of Kings'.
An animation company in Wales, https://www.clothcatanimation.com/cloth-cat-awarded-epic-megagrant/, is using Blender, but I'm not sure what for.
If you watched the film "Happy Death Day" (if not the lesser sequel) and enjoyed its exploration of a kind-of goofy mashup (Ground Hog Day x Teen Slasher), the same director made a film built on, roughly, a similar concept, just called "Freaky". If you already suspect you might like it, don't read anything and just watch, though you may be able to guess the mash-up from the one-word title. It's fun, and well-made.
I'm struggling to think of much else that I've personally seen, from last year, that wasn't a little too indie or "genre" for me to recommend it to someone whose tastes I don't know—I didn't get much new watched, and mostly caught up on some reputedly-great stuff I'd missed from the prior five years or so (I keep up with a mix of pop junk food films, which I do like, and the "good" stuff, but usually don't have time to watch anywhere near all of either) aside from some fairly taste-specific newer material I watched.
Some other titles I'm seeing, from people I know and trust, for 2020, include: First Cow; The Old Guard; Portrait of a Lady on Fire (technically a 2019 film, but widely available in 2020); Wolfwalkers (animated); Spontaneous; Bacurau; Blow the Man Down. There are lots more, that's just a varied sampling.
Yeah, it's sad – Wolfwalkers was a beautiful, innovative film. While you could argue Soul is better, no one even bothered to look into that category much because the winner was inevitable.
You haven’t really given AppleTV+ a fair shake. There are some great shows and movies on the service. Ted Lasso, Dickenson, Wolfwalkers, etc. It’s on the low price side of streaming services and a free year is included with many product purchases. I wouldn’t call that a failure by a long-shot.
Other shows I'd recommend are Trying (British comedy about a couple trying for a child) and the movie, Wolfwalkers.
I suppose "art" is meant as "technique" here. Modern large productions are so standardized today it is not an uncommon feeling one is watching the same movie ever end ever. I think the last Pixar movie that was worth is "Up" (OK I have not seen them all).
My main grief is that surprise is only obtained with a combination of visual effects, fast rhythm and loud sounds, and no more with the story. Relationships between characters is déjà-vu, so many times a conflicting parent/children relationship, where the parent is reflective but wrong and the child impulsive but right and they end up reconciling and admitting they were both partly right in the end. In "Soul" they play a bit with this pattern although I would hardly call this creativity.
And finally many animation movies are also shameless green washing (here thinking of Wolfwalkers). Remember the critical tone of Wall-E?