WolfWalkers (2020, Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart) (Patreon)

51/100

Significantly less beguiling than Moore's previous films, both visually and narratively. While I much prefer his ornate hand-drawn style to computer-animated plasticity, there's nothing here as eye-popping as The Secret of Kells' illuminated-manuscript backgrounds, or even Song of the Sea's combination of circles and squiggles; only Mebh's fiery nimbus of hair and feral expressions really stand out here, making the wolves seem downright innocuous by comparison. And derivative and/or arbitrary magic catches my notice more easily when I'm not constantly distracted by sheer beauty. I didn't so much mind the tweaking of classic werewolf lore, with the "curse" (?) transferred by means of a bite. Rather liked the concept of one's human form remaining intact and unconscious while the spirit wolf roams elsewhere. But having that involuntarily occur upon falling asleep (a) inevitably results in Body Snatchers-style efforts to remain awake 24-7 and (b) demands convenient fudging about when and how such transformations take place. No doubt screenwriter Will Collins has answers for all of my questions, but I shouldn't even be wondering, at the movie's most dramatic moment, whether a character who's only just been bitten, and has no reason to believe himself a wolfwalker (he's only accepted that they're real for like half a minute at that point), does the lupine equivalent of "hulking out" in anger. So it's a power that you can assume at will but that can also take hold of you at moments of severe emotional stress and that also kicks in every night all night whether or not you want it to? Is that the deal? Will Robyn eventually learn how to keep her soul tethered while she's asleep? If you re-enter your body immediately after taking wolf form, does the disjunction just keep happening over and over until the sun comes up, à la Gremlins (which doesn't make sense itself)? Again, this stuff might not have bugged me so much had the animation left me gaping in awe, but the woods just don't offer Moore enough fuel for visual inspiration. And he's still inflicting mediocre musical numbers on us—a sequence of your hero running with the wolves needn't be accompanied by a song called "Running With the Wolves." (Apparently this was a pre-existing track, slightly modified for the film, but that doesn't justify its use.)

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Actual title card's arguably ambiguous, though I see no good argument for Wolfwalkers (which is what everyone's using)—it's either WolfWalkers or Wolf Walkers, depending upon whether you think the tiny bit of extra room between the "f" and the second "w" (which is clearly capitalized) is a proper space or just an artifact of decking the "W"s out in foliage. But the fine print at the conclusion of the end credits dumps the shrubbery and retains the internal cap. It's WolfWalkers.