The images and animation of Wolfwalkers are so dazzling, so beautiful, so witty that it feels almost churlish to wish that they were in service to a less conventional story. It's the familiar tale of the spunky, underestimated kid who overcomes obstacles to save the day. The time is the 17th century and the place is the village of Kilkenny in Ireland, governed by a lord protector who is determined to exterminate a pack of wolves in a nearby forest. He hires Bill Goodfellowe, an English hunter, to do the job. His small daughter, Robyn, wants to help him, and ventures into the forest on her own. There she encounters a girl, Mebh, who turns out to be a wolfwalker, a human who can take the form of a wolf and who has mysterious healing powers. When Robyn is accidentally bitten by Mebh, she too becomes a wolfwalker, and gets involved in a plan to free Mebh's mother, Moll, who has been captured by the lord protector, and to save the wolf pack led by Moll from his campaign against them. The mythology gets a bit confusing and the denouement has the usual crises before a somewhat ambivalent resolution. But why complain about story when the visuals are so ravishing? The design contrasts the rigid, sharp-angled human world with the fluid, sinuous natural world, and even the characters are delineated by angles or curves -- the more angular, the more villainous, and the lord protector is virtually boxlike. Wolfwalkers is the third in a trilogy of films by Tomm Moore about Irish legends, after The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). It was deservedly nominated for a best animated feature Oscar, but lost to Pete Docter's Pixar film Soul.
