"PUT THIS SHELL to your ear and you hear the song of the sea,” whispers a mysterious mother to her mystified son in Tomm Moore’s new full-length animation picture.
Entitled Song of the Sea, this is Moore’s second cartoon feature. Like his first, The Secret of Kells (2009), it’s slated for Oscar and other award nominations, and it is a sheer captivating delight.
Written by Will Collins, Song of the Sea dives into the ancient Gaelic folklore of the Selkies, mythic creatures who move between land and ocean.
Shapeshifting between human and seal form, their wondrous watery adventures symbolise changing emotional states.
Song of the Sea makes vivid our concerns both ancient and modern and in a quirky narrative featuring the voices of Brendan Gleeson, Fionnula Flanagan, Pat Shortt and Lisa Hannigan, Moore brilliantly blends the familiar with the strange.
Hannigan voices the character of Bronagh, a heavily pregnant mother who submerges into the Atlantic on the night she gives birth to her daughter Saoirse.
Before she disappears, though, she gives her young son Ben the gift of a magic conch and leaves behind her seal-skin coat.
It transpires that Bronagh is a Selkie, returning to the salty depths and until she’s reunited with her coat the song of sea cannot be sung.
No music is heard above or below the water line and all musicians are turned to stone — the Irish epitome of a cultural holocaust.
Years after Bronagh’s disappearance Ben and his sister Saoirse live with their grieving father Conor (Gleeson) and pet dog Cu. It’s not a happy household.
Their home is a lighthouse perched atop a towering, angular escarpment. The headland is assaulted by hail and wind.
Saoirse is not yet talking but seems unsettled, drawn to the seals that swim close to the shoreline. The miasma of pervading melancholy isn’t relieved by the arrival of Granny (Flanagan), whose concern comes over as interference: “I’ve had enough of this carry on,” she says.
She brings the children with her to Dublin, from where they make their escape, leading them to an underwater world of amazing adventures.
If all this sounds fantastical then the tortuous making of the film is another story.
Five years in production, Song of the Sea has been created with contributions from five different European countries (including Luxembourg).
This year it has screened at festivals in France and South Korea, and drawn praise at the Toronto International Film Festival and the recent London Film Festival.
Coming up in mid-November it screens at the Leeds International Film Festival.
Though its appeal is universal the story echoes with specific Gaelic allusions.
Selkie myth is deep in Irish/Scottish folklore and to create the aesthetic imagery for Song of the Sea, Moore goes back to draw upon Celtic-Pictish rock paintings.
Though the picture is set in contemporary times, its look evokes time immemorial.
Moore’s images are hand-drawn, not CGI.
Story elements sit in juxtaposition — the narrative works because of opposites.
The curved and smooth shapes of the human figures jar with the jagged lines of the world they’re battling to thrive in. There are two sensibilities at odds.
The shared symbolism of the Selkie in Irish and Scottish legend probably stems from the historic links between the two countries.
The seaways between the two landscapes are less than 10 miles wide and the life passing between them goes back to pre-history.
Selkie figures represent a lifestyle that entailed a constant shift between land and water. Its inherent danger, uncertainty and drama would need to be expressed in storytelling myth.
It was a part of cultural history that intrigued WB Yeats.
His dreamy poem The Stolen Child is heard in breathy whispers on the Song of the Sea soundtrack. Yeats’ lines, “Come away, human child/To the water and the wild,” provide an eerie background.
The call of the submarine world is irresistible to Ben and Saoirse, who are pulled into the unpredictable rhythms of tide and current.
There’s a sense of a risky and painful transformation at hand.
Moore has set the story in 1987, a time when he reckons Ireland finally, though not easily, embraced the modern world. The moral concerns in the film also reflect upon our present day.
A pall of morbidity has settled over the land, which needs lifting urgently.
A familiar moral melancholy prevails.
Though Song of the Sea is softer stuff than John Michael McDonagh’s stinging satire Calvary, both films convey the current want for spiritual vitality.
McDonagh, of course, lately made some caustic criticisms about the poor quality we sometimes find in Irish film. In some ways he’s right enough.
Yet in the sphere of animation cinema, Irish film-makers are rightly internationally renowned.
In 2012 the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (sort of Cannes for cartoons) dedicated an entire section to Irish films.
Ireland is a “creative hotspot” for animation, the organisers said.
Song of the Sea is less tightly scripted than The Secret of Kells and less fluorescent.
Still, its charm distinctly shows that some creative minds in Irish cinema can literally bathe the screen in colour.
The Song of the Sea plays at the Leeds International Film Festival on Saturday, November 15.
