This is the third of three films by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon and directed by Tomm Moore based on Irish folklore and mythology. I wasn’t a big fan of the first two so I was surprised to find myself liking this quite a bit more. It has better unity in its theme and purpose and you get a real sense of peril to its characters. But I think it also works better because I walked into this with fewer expectations of how it would work as a werewolf story. It’s still a children’s show in that it holds back on having anything truly awful happen but the higher stakes do make an appreciable difference.

The Irish town of Kilkenny is fearful of wolves based in a forest nearby and an English hunter Goodfellowe is assigned to exterminate them. His daughter Robyn is eager to help with her crossbow but the Lord Protector of the town is strict and forbids children from leaving. She sneaks out anyway and after an altercation with a wolf, learns that she is Mebh, a little girl who lives in the woods and transforms into a wolf when her human body falls asleep. She leads a pack of wolves with her mother who is currently asleep in her human form as her wolf form has gone out in search of a new home for them. After she returns home that night, Robyn who had been bitten during their brief fight, manifests a wolf form. Goodfellowe who sees the wolf in his daughter’s room tries to attack her, and in fear Robyn flees back to the woods where Megb explains that she too has become a wolfwalker and teaches her how to be accustomed to the new body and new senses.

This probably doesn’t sound like any version of the werewolf myth you’ve heard of but apparently there really is at least one Irish myth in which it works exactly like this, down to the human and wolf bodies sharing the same injuries. Naturally there is nothing horrific about the transformation here and it is instead represented as an exhilarating escape from the oppression of the governing authority and the tight confines of the walled city. There’s even a double layer of meaning here as the Lord Protector along with Robyn and her father are from England and their presence is somewhat resented by the Irish. I disliked how Robyn is portrayed as being so eager to kill wolves in the beginning yet is so passive and fearful when she realizes the wolves are friendly and harmless and it is the people who are about to do them harm. But on reflection, this does aptly capture the difficulty of Robyn and her father in turning against the established order of the society they live in, particularly when that authority is backed up by the church. The sight of Goodfellowe, big and strong as he is shown here, being utterly helpless to resist the cruel orders of the Lord Protector, makes for a particularly powerful image.

The film goes to some scarily dark places at times. At one point, Robyn recruits some of the street toughs who regularly bullies her to cage Mebh for her own good. But this in turn leads to one of its major failings: as it is still fundamentally a children’s show, the characters are too protected from the consequences of their actions. Just as Mebh too easily forgives Robyn, Goodfellowe’s own actions are too easily absolved. The film is also very careful not to show the wolves actually cause much bloodshed and skips over the fact that they’re still carnivores that must hunt other animals for sustenance. That’s why it’s a little weird to see how far the film is willing to go, with a scene showing the Lord Protector threatening to execute Mebh’s mother for example, but then always stops short of crossing this absolute line. It makes the happy ending feel unearned and unrealistic.

Even if I didn’t really like the previous two films, I’d still only had praise for their art and I think even in this department, Wolfwalkers is the best one yet. The flowy, traditional 2D animation style shows off the swift motion of the wolves wonderfully. At times, there is an unfinished sort of look to the art and that actually helps portray the urgency of the moment. Combined with its solid story and strong themes, this is an animated feature that I would not hesitate to recommend.