Irish animation is an increasingly popular area of study and, unsurprisingly, much recent scholarship has tended to celebrate or critically examine aspects of Cartoon Saloon’s globally renowned feature films. However, other aspects of Irish animation are beginning to gain attention too, from Thomas Walsh’s reading of Irish animation as postcolonial discourse (2009) to Yvonne Hennessy’s fascinating work on Irish female contributors to animation (2020). Yet, the animal in Irish animation has still to gain sustained attention. In response to this, the following paper argues for a reconsideration of the figures of extinct yet symbolically significant Irish animals “reanimated” in the feature film Wolfwalkers (2020) and the short The Last Elk (1998).

Though relatively little academic reflection exists on the topic of Irish animated animals, the use of animal imagery in and about Ireland has a long history, by turns celebratory and demeaning. The first coinage of the Irish Free State, released in 1928, featured Percy Metcalfe’s designs, which were reflective of Ireland’s economic reliance on agriculture (Caffrey 2011: 75), and reproduced images of domestic and wild animals such as the bull and salmon. Yet, the pictorial connection between Irish human and non-human animals is historically complicated by the legacy of British colonialism. Famously, Lewis P. Curtis’ 1971 Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature traced how Victorian British political cartoons recast the native Irish people as “dangerous anthropoid” or “simianised agitators” of Fenian rebellion (vii-x), and in other instances Irish people were bestialised and compared to pigs, dogs or even wolves by British and American cartoonists and writers (Townsend 2015: 55-72). Estudios Irlandeses’ fascinating Issue Eco-fictions, The Animal Trope and Irish Studies (2020) further uncovered elements of animality within Irish studies and particularly within written fiction regarding Jonathan Swift’s eternally noble Houyhnhnms (see Bartosch 2020 and Lázaro-Lafuente 2020) and in an intriguing essay on Frances Power Cobbe (see Carrera 2020). As the following paper observes, older depictions of Irish animals, and humans, often stemmed from commentators outside of Ireland and Irish culture, or from those who wrote as part of the Anglo-Irish class. How modern Irish filmmakers make use of these older conceptions often demonstrates an intentional repurposing of older – frequently negative – ideas to tell new stories of significant interest to both Irish cultural and, potentially, animality studies.

The Last Elk is a 1998 seven-minute short directed by Alan Shannon and produced by Brown Bag Films. It was funded by the FRAMEWORKS scheme, supporting short film production in Ireland and is an artistically rendered retelling of the events that led to the demise of the last herd of extinct giant deer, with the final animal killed by humans. A title card explicitly positions the events as occurring in “Éire” of “9000 BC”, a filmic decision that links the Gaelic title with a pre-human past. The giant deer species featured is famed for its size and colossal antlers spanning over three and a half metres. Today largely referred to by its scientific name of Megaloceros giganteus, it was formerly dubbed the “Irish elk”, a scientific misnomer that will nevertheless be used throughout this paper. The film was made when Ireland was still striving to create a stable indigenous industry capable of consistently making animation that reflected themes inspired by national and local concerns. 1992 saw the liquidation of the final iteration of American filmmaker Don Bluth’s feature animation studio. Present in Dublin since the mid-1980s, this studio’s collapse left many skilled animators without employment, but also coincided with an increase in new studios established by indigenous artists. Many Irish animation artists, including Brown Bag’s founders, Darragh O’Connell and Cathal Gaffney, and Shannon, had been educated through the Bluth-established course in animation delivered by the Senior College, Ballyfermot (renamed Ballyfermot College of Further Education (BCFE) in 1999).

Wolfwalkers is Cartoon Saloon’s 2020 Oscar-nominated feature film directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, with production also credited to Luxembourg Mélusine productions, and distributed by the American platform Apple Plus TV. The fantasy narrative depicts a budding friendship between two young girls on either side of the colonial divide in the 1650 city of Kilkenny. The central protagonist, Robyn, has moved to Ireland with her father, Bill, an English hunter hired by the Lord Protector – a loosely veiled allusion to Oliver Cromwell – to exterminate the last wolves living in the forests bordering Kilkenny. She befriends Mebh, an Irish girl who is, furthermore, a wolf walker who transforms into a wolf when she sleeps and whose mother has gone missing. The story is one of changing perspectives and reconciliation in which two girls attempt to save a wolf pack of which they are part from the fate of extinction. Additionally, the girls’ actions further allow the film to explore a more nuanced side to historical British-Irish relations. In contrast to The Last Elk, Wolfwalkers has been produced at a time of strength for Ireland’s animation industry, with Ruth Barton proposing that it is the “success story of Irish cinema in the twenty-first century” (2019: 41). Despite international funding and co-production, Wolfwalkers is confidently viewed as the capstone to Moore’s “Irish Folklore Trilogy”, which includes The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). Eve Benhamou has observed that “Cartoon Saloon crafts a distinctive studio identity by an emphasis on artisanal labour practices and local processes, national culture and folklore, drawing on the myth of the handmade and the construction of the animation auteur” (2024). This homely, hand-crafted aesthetic has come to somewhat veil Cartoon Saloon’s reliance on participation in European co-production practices, which is necessary in gathering funding and skilled professionals needed to construct an animated feature.

From Fact to Fiction – Lauri Honko and the Development of Identity

The Irish elk and wolf are figures derived from Ireland’s natural history. In each narrative the filmmakers have borrowed facts from reality, particularly choosing to highlight the event of the elk and wolves’ extinction. By remoulding these facts the filmmakers create a backdrop that, however historically interpretive, includes fragments of truth. Consequently, this provides a legitimate extratextual background that frames how the elk and wolf are incorporated as symbolically relevant to Ireland in these animated narratives. Ethnologist and folklorist Lauri Honko provides a useful chart that ventures to describe the process of identity formation using the keywords “history”, “myth” and “symbol”. He notes that “as inchoate historical facts become cultured, they are integrated into world order and attain sacredness comparable to myth, and may develop into markers of identity and carry a symbolic loading that exceeds their literal meaning” (1996: 18-36). Honko’s methodology concerning the creation of tradition into culture suggests how facts derived from history, in this case the natural and zoological history of Ireland, pass through everyday processes to become part of the local people’s “myth”. In turn, these myths can become inherently connected to a real place or space, finally investing the animal with a recognisable status that allows it to become a symbol of a naturalised nationality.

Wild wolves roamed Ireland up until the 18th century and comprise the country’s most recent large mammal extinction (Hickey 2013: 108). In contrast, the Irish elk was last common to Ireland during the Pleistocene Epoch (colloquially dubbed the “Ice Age”),[1] with the youngest Irish-found fossils dating from approximately 12,500 years ago (Monaghan 2022). Significantly, while Irish wolves were being hunted to extinction by humans, partly encouraged by the late 17th century Cromwellian campaign that sought to make the Irish landscape conducive to agriculture for English and Scottish settlers through heavy deforestation, the scientific possibility of the overall extinction of any species of fauna would come to rely heavily on the fossilised remains of the Irish elk. Many of the earliest and best-preserved specimens were unearthed from layers of marle found underneath Irish peat bogs from the 16th century onwards, with the exploitation of bogs for fuel connected partially to the dwindling availability of wood caused by the deforestation, suggesting a connection between the medieval wolf’s extinction and the prehistoric elk’s rediscovery. The oldest recorded find of a giant deer in Ireland is dated to 1588 when a skull and antlers were discovered in a bog in Co. Meath. In 1597 the official representative of the British Crown in Ireland, Adam Loftus, included the first contemporary illustration of an Irish elk in a letter addressed to the then Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Cecil (Monaghan 2019: 60).

While numerous material records of the Irish elk exist, Hickey notes that of the medieval Irish wolf “there is a surprising lack of drawings, paintings, detailed written descriptions and stuffed specimens” (2013: 108). The wolf became extinct prior to the Victorian craze of preserving specimens of natural history, and it is ironic that little remains of the recently extinct animal in Ireland while copious evidence of the long dead flourishes. However, wolves are present in Irish mythology and folklore, with Gerald of Wales’ 12th century text, Topographia Hibernica, including the strange tale in which a priest encountered the wolfmen of Ossory. This was illustrated a number of times, as in an expressive 12th century manuscript held by the British Library which depicts a wolf approaching a monk by a fire (MS13B VIII).

Here, one could propose that the “history” of the elk and wolf begins a transition into “myth”, the second stage in Honko’s process of becoming a symbol. The story of the wolfmen of Ossory added additional legendary connotations to the connection between Irish humans and wolves, localising what is otherwise a universal theme of lycanthropy and transformation. Though O’Connor suggests that the tale may originally have been interpreted as yet another animalisation of the Irish, Moore and Stewart repurposed the legend of the cursed inhabitants of Ossory, two of whose members were obliged to transform into wolves for seven years as part of St Natalis’ curse. Stewart explained that the Irish wolf’s extinction had been a focal point from the early stages of the film: “We had wanted to talk about the extinction of species, and polarisation of speciesism […] if we were going to talk about extinction it would be the extinction of the wolves…” (Hickey et al. 2021: 03:50-04:13). Additionally, the Irish name for wolf “mac tíre” translates loosely as “son of the country”, suggesting inherent connections between the wolf and the Irish landscape, indicated in Wolfwalkers by Mebh’s surname (proudly proclaimed as she perches on the back of a writhing stream of wolves galloping through the forest) but also suggested visually in scenes where the wolf pack forms amorphous masses that move in complement to the landscape.

Thomas Walsh proposes that Shannon’s film draws the figure of the animal from a far more tangible source: “The prominent position of fossilised elk skeletons in the lobby of Ireland’s Natural History Museum have inspired the production of a mythic fairytale that projects modern concerns over man’s effect on the natural environment onto a pre-industrial past” (2009: 187). Though both Walsh and Shannon acknowledge that, in reality, it is unlikely that the presence of the Irish elk overlapped with humanity’s arrival in Ireland, fact is repurposed to create a fictional message and the Irish elk remains undeniably connected to Irish perceptions of natural history. However, neither animal was ever confined to the geographical region of Ireland. Like the modern wolf, the Irish elk was found across Europe from Ireland to Russia and with Asian variations. Poignantly, Gould reflected that the Irish elk “is misnamed in all its attributes: it is neither exclusively Irish nor an elk” (1973: 191). Yet, the misnomer, connected to the discovery of fossilised skeletons in Irish bogs and a misinterpretation by Molyneux that the modern American Moose was the same animal, has meant that the myth of “Irishness” appears to have stuck to the animal and become permanent. However, to ensure that we understand the setting of the film and the animal’s placement within it, a title card before the animated images begin informs us that the setting of the film is Éire, 9000 BC.

Thus, the Irish elk becomes a symbolic entity, standing for the natural and untouched pre-human world and understood as a recognisable figure from Irish natural history. The Irish elk was already absorbed into discourses of the country’s natural history when Shannon incorporated the animal into his film’s narrative, and was recently used once more in the peculiar UK-Ireland-Canadian-America co-produced film Riverdance: The Animated Adventure (Rosenbaum and Butler 2021). The wolf needs considerably more framing to be understood as explicitly “Irish”. This was achieved by intermingling elements from Irish natural history, the legend found in an illuminated manuscript and the Irish language name as indicated above. Therefore, the wolf becomes a symbol for the destruction of Ireland’s natural forestry, implicitly linked to 17th century British colonisation, and a pertinent warning about humankind’s ability to both cause and prevent extinction. Within animation both creatures are pulled out of the natural realm and into ideas of culture and human artistry – undergoing conceptual transitions to become symbolic. The animal subsequently exceeds “literal” (or biological) meaning and is drawn into the shifting discourses of Irish cultural creation.

Incorporating Animated Animals into a Cultural Landscape through Design

From the above discussion, it is evident that how the animated non-human animal is conceived within the paradigm of Irish culture is a topic open to multiple interpretations. Donna Haraway persuasively warns in her Companion Species Manifesto that:

Biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concreteness – i.e., the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions like “nature” and “culture” for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations. There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends. (2003: 6)

Haraway’s statement suggests that ideas such as “nature” and “culture” are continually changed and reformed by those who use them and that this affects the living (and animated) animals that will continually be subject to new negotiations. Even in the ultimate death of extinction the figure of the wolf and elk have the potential to be reintegrated and reinterpreted within examinations of what is understood as “Irish” culture. Furthermore, based on Haraway’s concept of the naturalcultural, Paul Wells suggested that the intermingling of the often opposed concepts of “nature” and “culture” is “effectively the creative and intellectual environment in which the representations of animated animals exist; consequently, this raises fundamental questions about the relationship between nature and culture” (2009: 18).

The human and non-human animals in both films are frequently designed in combination with recognisable symbols drawn from pre-Christian Celtic stone art, metalwork and Christian illuminated manuscripts. Traditional Irish motifs have been linked to the creation of a modern visual identity through schemes from the Kilkenny Design Workshop initiative of the 1960s to the countercultural illustrations of Jim Fitzpatrick (Connolly 2011). Though traditional Celtic motifs, like the elk and wolf, find companions in countries and Celtic cultures other than Ireland, they remain ingrained within discussions of Irish design. These motifs are often considered to be an authenticating element of the Celticness or Irishness of Cartoon Saloon’s design aesthetic. Barton for instance, in her reading of Moore’s earlier film The Secret of Kells, notes:

The Celtic triskele, with its origins in pre-Christianity and its subsequent appropriation as a symbol of the Holy Trinity under Christianity, emerges as a key motif. Impressed upon the forest trees, it hints at a pantheistic utopian vision of a time when paganism and spirituality were embedded within a harmonic natural environment. (2019: 55)

The Celtic triskele or spiral features heavily in the visual design of the wolf walkers “magic”. The “non-human” wolves who could be read as “natural” faunal inhabitants of the landscape are quite literally drawn into the culture of the semi-human wolf walkers as their howls are illustrated with a magical intensity of yellow light and surrounded by streams of Celtic spirals. Likewise, in his consideration of The Last Elk Thomas Walsh proposed that “[p]erhaps a natural Irishness resides in the elks themselves, the triskele pattern of Celtic artefacts being a prominent element in their design, and there is the distinct possibility of reading the human presence as a colonial interjection into a natural Irish world” (2009: 187).

However, on closer examination reliance on the triskele pattern as an indication of the natural Irishness of the Irish elk as opposed to the human begins to break down. These patterns are inscribed into the landscape, creating a visual link between the elk and the ground plane on which they are animated, but significantly these motifs are also present in all the living animals of the film – including the humans whom Walsh had characterised as “colonial interjections” (2009:187). Small details that only become evident on multiple viewings are the inclusion of spiral patterns as the humans’ ears and in the tip of the central hunter’s beard. Similarly, the extremities of the crows’ legs are spiral shaped, visible as they glide above the Irish elk stag early in the film. This observation opens the film up to an interpretation that reflects a more nuanced view of humanity’s destruction of the natural landscape. If the human hunters within The Last Elk are, in truth, inscribed with a sign of natural Irishness it means that they are not necessarily to be read as colonisers, external creatures entering Ireland from the outside. Instead, a starker warning about the potential for damage wrought by those who are local to an area is suggested, posing uneasy questions about native Irish people’s complicity in the destruction of their own natural environment that moves beyond colonial discourses and fables of invasion and Irish innocence.

Nonetheless, in being rendered a symbol and due to their ability to carry conceptions of nature and culture simultaneously, the non-human animal could be easily relegated to a peripheral place within discussion of these films. For instance, in Wolfwalkers, the loose sketchy lines depicting the wolves’ bodies are used to symbolically align them to the wild natural design of the forest. The forest environment is visually opposed to the rigid woodblock design that makes Kilkenny town suggestive of order and the strictures of an organised society. Consequently, examining the presence of the non-human animal in opposition to the patterned look of the town and its inhabitants initially appears to be a self-evident aspect of viewing the text. Instead, attention is centred on Robyn’s journey of “becoming animal” (to borrow a defining term of Deleuze and Guatarri’s A Thousand Plateaus and a cornerstone of the literature of animality studies), and the presence of the human within these texts often appears to overshadow the non-human animal. Though he notes its obviousness, Wells points out that “the presence or absence of the human in relation to the animal makes a significant difference to the understanding of the animal” (2009: 121). This seems particularly poignant when considering Wolfwalkers, a case where the general wolves of the wolf pack and the wolves who are transformed humans (the wolf walkers such as Robyn and Mebh) are visually distinguishable through design, the use of expressions, speech, movement, and sound. Though evidently an active and practical decision on the part of the animation team, by choosing to portray the “generic”, “natural” or “real” wolves as darker grey, with narrower heads, slim slanted eyes and mouths that tend to pant and stretch more often and expressively than their wolf walker counterparts, we are drawn into a complicated consideration that conceives two versions of what it is to physically be the same animal. The wolf walkers are more humanised in their expressions, often exhibiting facial animation that complements their human form, and are also given slightly shorter snouts, suggestive not just of age but also of human fascination with neoteny (as in the case of Mebh’s mother Moll). The wolf walkers’ eyes also appear to be set in more anthropomorphically familiar positions.

Yet, it would be possible to also read these character design decisions as confirmation of the expected boundaries typical of the human-animal divide. Questions remain over whether these choices result in simplistic, human-centric narratives that fail to shift our consideration of living – or extinct – non-human species.

Sight and Power – Distinctions between the Human and Non-human Animal

The notion of sight, gaze and ways of seeing is central to animation production and viewing. This sense also occupies a central place in how the animals are constructed through these two films. Here it will be argued that the theme of sight and this sense’s place within human and non-human interactions is a shared and key defining feature of both films. In The Last Elk, eyes become essential to framing the final elk’s slaughter at the hands of a human hunter, while Wolfwalkers much-celebrated “Wolf Vision” sequences help to propose complicated readings of how the human and non-human might be considered when placed together in fantastical narratives.

Wolfwalkers’ wolf vision sequences have often been singled out for discussion in academic and popular publications, including Jazz Tangcay’s journalistic piece for Variety magazine and a dedicated section within the Art of Wolfwalkers artbook outlining the development of these hand-drawn sequences that were used to recreate the world from a wolf’s point of view. Erin Hawley’s excellent chapter on the potential fostering of environmental empathy in children through their viewing of animated texts makes use of this, noting that:

Wolfwalkers uses its power as an animated text to invite young viewers into a non-human way of seeing, enabling the audience to move through the imaginary world as a non-human creature and activating a new perspective on environmental problems such as hunting, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. (2022: 168)

However, though Hawley’s statement suggests that viewers are invited to experience the “world as a non-human creature”, Charles Solomon perceptively notes that “Wolfvision takes the audience to a place they’ve never experienced: a human girl’s discovery of how wolves perceive people, places and animals” (Soloman 2020: 206). Evidently, we can understand this section as an opportunity to view the world from a non-human perspective with the knowledge that the characters have been transformed into wolves, but are also encouraged to realise that our discovery remains filtered through the eyes of a human girl.

Similarly, snippets of dialogue beg questions about how the hierarchy of the wolves and wolf walkers is to be read and what this means for the relationship between the real wolves and the wolf walkers as beings that transverse a space between the human and wolf. Shortly after Robyn has re-entered the forest and located Merlyn, her pet falcon, Mebh and the wolf pack, she asks Mebh: “And are any of the other wolves… people too?” Mebh replies “No Jeepers, are you mad?! How big do you think me family is!” (00:30:54-00:31:05). Although this line can simply be taken to convey Mebh and her mother’s reliance on each other as the last of the wolf walkers, this dialogue introduces further evidence of a division that is maintained between acknowledging the pack as made up of true wolves and as people that transform into wolves while they sleep. By indicating that the wolf walkers are separate beings to the non-human animals of the pack, this fantasy narrative gives us space to acknowledge the valuable differences that exist between the humans and non-human animals of the narrative. Although Mebh exhibits characteristics that ally her with the wolves, her face forming sharp angles and big pointed teeth, her hair melding into the landscape when she runs and her propensity to howl, she remains distinctly human and is a figure that can traverse both worlds. The wolf walkers and the wolves tread an uneasy space within Haraway’s conception of companion species relationships. In some scenes the real wolves and wolf walkers are framed as facing the same challenges and can be understood to have become the same creature. More often there is a palpable difference between the real wolves and wolf walkers which extends beyond reading Mebh and Moll as simply being the alphas within the pack. Once again nature and culture clash as these animals are created within an animated historical fantasy, allowing the viewer to observe two distinctly different versions of what it looks like to be a wolf.

In the formative Why Look at Animals, John Berger observes that in the photography of Fréderéic Rossif:

Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-expanding knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are. (2009: 27)

In Wolfwalkers, although we primarily experience being a wolf through the adapted body of a transformed human girl, we are given an opportunity to believe that all wolves in the narrative can be observers and, therefore, can argue that this animation successfully complicates and subverts Berger’s observation. In The Last Elk, the privilege of observation is reserved only for the hunter. Initially, the humans are abstracted and simplified, as sightless as the rest of the film’s characters. However, as the bearded hunter peeks out from behind the trunk of a tree his eyes gradually come into view and widen at the sight of the immense deer. Sight becomes an essential feature of this human hunter, who watches the frantic spirals ripple over the elk’s pelt just before he deals a fatal blow to the animal with his spear and whose eye’s frame and reflect the departure of the elk’s “spirit” in the final moments of the film. Though the elk is the film’s protagonist, the animal has been designed without eyes or facial features. This design choice emphasises the animal’s bodily movement and actions, giving the elk no opportunity to watch its surroundings as the human hunter does. The coat hanger-like head’s central purpose is to support the weight of the elk’s gigantic antlers suggesting that in animation, as in life, the viewer’s focus is narrowed to this single impressive physical feature and might run the risk of viewers knowing little else about the animal. This mirrors a remark by Gould that female specimens of Irish elk were often viewed as less interesting by collectors of natural history specimens as they did not carry antlers (1973). Alternatively, these decisions could be read as a metaphor for the opening of humanity’s eyes to the beauty of a natural non-human form, leading to an acknowledgment of our effect on the natural environment. The end of the film suggests a realisation that the encounter should have been enough without the killing of the animal, however innocent or seemingly necessary. Yet, in Shannon’s film the final few minutes draw us away from an animal-centric retelling of the causes of its extinction and reframes the narrative as one of humankind’s connection to the objectified animal.

In an Irish context, this paper proposes that by discerning the different approaches to the theme of sight, one can potentially see a shift in how the theme of environmental concern and the animal’s role might be considered through animation. Though proposed in the animal/human relationship in Shannon’s still beautiful and thought-provoking 1990s work, Wolfwalkers takes concern for the environment and the animals within it a step further. By associating the animal with the human while acknowledging differences, the animated animal is propelled into 21st century discourses of decolonisation. The 12th Century Welsh writer Cambrensis’ (also known as Gerald of Wales) telling of the Wolfmen of Ossory is reclaimed as inspiration for an ecocritical tale set within the frame of Irish animated national cinema. By embracing a legend, the filmmakers imaginatively allow the human characters to traverse the human/animal binary in a positive and beneficial way. Furthermore, the film reembraces femininity by transforming the once degrading stereotype of the Irish Celt’s “femininity” to a positive force within Irish children’s media with the inclusion of two girls as the main protagonists. As a whole, elements of Wolfwalkers come to propose a more nuanced way of regarding both human and non-human animals in and of themselves.

Though much work is left to be done in gathering a broader range of animated texts, comparison of these films suggests that 21^st century ecological thinking has enabled a shift in the use of non-human animals in Irish animated narratives. The privileging of a pulled back, observing, male and human-centric viewpoint demonstrated in The Last Elk has given way to a gradual widening of perspective. Wolfwalkers provides the non-human animals with an opportunity to see and be seen as central to the creation of narrative and active within their own future survival. However, it is fully acknowledged that this broadened perspective is filtered through human eyes, the eyes of a young girl and by way of the animated medium, lending nuance to our approach and posing further questions about the integration of non-human forms within such animated films and how the viewer may react to these choices.

Conclusion

To read these films as “Irish” narratives, having an awareness of the history and development of these animals in Ireland and the events (both real and imaginary) that the films reflect is continually useful. Drawing extratextual details from the zoological history of extinct Irish animals provided the filmmakers with somewhat factual foundations on which to construct fictional, and often fantastical, narratives capable of commenting on diverse themes of Irishness, identity formation, visual culture, and pressing issues such as the mass extinction of species and ecological threat. The process of something becoming symbolic is multi-phased and gradual, often relying on the symbolic subject’s relationship to other elements such as national language or even a curator’s choice of the placement of physical objects in public spaces such as museums. Honko’s approach to describing the process of identity formation remains a valuable tool, allowing informed viewers an opportunity to trace how filmmakers may come to select and justify the use of absent animals within a national cinematic context.

Discussions concerning the use of non-human animated animals have the potential to add much to our viewings of Irish made animation and culture. Furthermore, certain universal concerns can be addressed by closely examining how the 2D animated form can successfully highlight themes that may become hidden when real or CGI animals are used. Viewing the animal as an integrated symbol within national culture is further strengthened by the use of the animated form. Animation filmmakers have an unparalleled ability to literally incorporate motifs selected from visual artforms within character designs with modifications comfortably accepted by audiences who are familiar with animation’s language. Through indigenous animation we find new ways that sometimes reframe previous, non-Irish conceptions of these animals, for modern postcolonial or decolonial purposes.

However, nature and culture cannot easily be separated in these narratives, with animals becoming deeply associated with romanticised ideas of the natural world. In being animated the real animal is hidden from view, distilled within a symbolic human culture. Placing human and non-human animals within animated texts remains significant and raises deeper questions about our desire to be part of the natural world while also wishing to familiarise it through human expression and, in many animated films, the use of anthropomorphism and neoteny in character designs. As these animated films tend to replicate a human-centric viewing of the world, the non-human animal’s point of view is continually placed just beyond the edges of the screen and outside of our range of imaginative perspective. As species that exist beyond human culture, questions remain on how Irish animation can be used to represent the non-human animal form and what impact this shall have on our future entanglements with nature and culture.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies for supporting attendance and presentation of an early version of this paper at the 11th BAFTSS Conference in 2023. Thanks also to FilmEU for supporting the presentation of a later version of this paper at the FilmEU RIT Summit 2023. The assistance and guidance of all who contributed their thoughts to the development of this paper is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

[1] See Johnson (n.d.).