The New Yorker: Cartoon Saloon and the New Golden Age of Animation

By Mark O'Connell

Today, most animated films are made entirely digitally.

"But Moore believes that computer graphics are subject to a built-in obsolescence. 'Computer animation is moving so fast that ‘Toy Story’ looks really ropy now,' he said. 'Whereas there are hand-drawn films from the nineteen-forties that still stand up. 'Bambi' still looks really timeless. And that’s because its language is the language of painting and illustration, rather than the language of the latest technology.'"

In the late 70s, as Disney studios went into a state of decline after Walt Disney's death, one of its animators, Don Bluth, opened Sullivan Bluth Studios, the first rival to Disney. He industrialized the film animation process, and as it began to see competition, Disney produced a string of hits from "Aladdin" to "The Lion King". Sullivan Bluth eventually went out of business, but not before it set up an animation course at a nearby university. That's where Tomm Moore, a director and founder of Cartoon Saloon, enrolled in 1995. There he met Paul Young and Nora Twomey, who went on to found the animation studio with him.

"'Nearly everyone in my class ended up going into computer animation,' Moore told me. 'I wanted to be a classical animator in the way of the old Disney movies.'"

 Even though the company's first movie, "The Secret of Kells", had a small budget, it was a hit that got nominated to Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, and was defeated by "Up", which had a significantly larger budget.

Pete Docter, the director of 'Up,' told me that when he first saw 'The Secret of Kells' he was struck by how it defied prevailing trends. 'At the time,' he said, 'it was all about 3-D, and Cartoon Saloon were instead embracing the graphic. They were embracing flatness—not only the flatness of an animation tradition, but also of Celtic design, and merging these things together in ways that were really unexpected but also very sophisticated.'

In the years that followed, Cartoon Saloon produced many more hits with their distinctly traditional animation that were nominated for Oscars. As the pandemic hit, their next one, "Wolfwalkers" was in its final stages of production.