Maria O’Brien – The Secret of Kells (2009), a film for a post Celtic Tiger Ireland?

The Secret of Kells (2009) (dir. Tomm Moore) is a feature length animated film that plays with myth, truth and fiction to propose an originating story for the Book of Kells, a highly decorated 8^th century  insular book containing the four gospels of the Bible.  The film was conceived and produced by Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny, Ireland but due to the limited funding available in Ireland for feature length animation, the film was made with co-producers in Europe (including Les Armatuers in France, Vivi Film in Belgium, and France 2 Cinema) and animation teams in Brazil and Hungary; though still primarily in Ireland. 

The film deals with organized religion and the church in a way that moves on from recent Irish fiction films that show an anti-clerical fixation (fuelled by an almost never ending series of clerical scandals) such as The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Songs for a Raggy Boy, (2003) (Brereton, 2008); but shows the universality of nature as an inspiration for the creation of the Book of Kells.  This move away from the organized church as a narrative focal point makes the film more accessible to international audiences, as evidenced by the film obtaining worldwide distributors, particularly a US distributor and nomination for an Oscar, but can perhaps be seen as a exploitation of Irish myths to obtain funding within Ireland and to export Ireland as a source of mythic origins to attempt to speak to a global viewer in universalist terms.

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