Swanvale Halt Film Club: The Secret of Kells

It's somewhat worrying that I've only mentioned two films so far, both of them children's animated features, but there you go. The Secret of Kells is, unsurprisingly, a fantasy about the writing of the Book of Kells, the astonishing eighth-century manuscript Gospel Book now in the British Museum. 12-year-old Brendan is a novice at the Abbey of Kells and nephew of Abbot Cellach. When the famed manuscript illuminator Brother Aidan arrives from Iona, fleeing the Vikings, Brendan is captivated into assisting him, much to the fury of Cellach who insists it's much more important to complete the Abbey's great walls so that the monks and villagers will be protected from Viking raiders. Brendan, befriended by the wood-fairy Aisling, has to decide where his future lies and brave the dangers that choice entails.

The animation is extremely beautiful and accomplished, obviously inspired by the swirling, fractal (and slightly mad) patterns and abstractions of the Book of Kells itself: visually, the film is incredible, especially in the set-pieces including Brendan and Aisling's exploration of the forest, Brendan's battle with the snake god Crom Cruach, and the Viking attack on the Abbey which is actually harrowing. It's very stylised, but as is often the case this stylisation makes the sense of reality more vivid. The story is as slender as you could imagine, but the dazzling visuals mean that doesn't matter. The film wears the Christian context very lightly - the Book is never even stated to be a copy of the Gospels - but the Abbey is clearly Christian with its crosses and plainchant, and Abbot Cellach, from appearing a stereotyped, authoritarian cleric at the start, emerges as a self-sacrificing, responsible leader who suffers for the sake of the people in his care. When he's lying on the burning ground of the Abbey with an arrow in his shoulder and a sword wound in his back and Brother Tang tells him, 'You are the Abbot of Kells. You must stand up', it's rather moving. Despite, or perhaps because of, the stylisation, The Secret of Kells gives you some sense of why the Dark Ages were called that: the impression of the Abbey being an island of civilisation surrounded by the hostile or merely wild world comes over beautifully.

Quite aside from that, there's a spiritual debate embedded in the film, though very sotto voce. Cellach's model for the spiritual life is to defend it against evil by constructing protective walls; Brother Aidan insists that the Book 'which will give the people hope' has to be taken out into the world to do its work. Naturally we need both on different occasions, the defensive and the defenceless, the wary and the hopeful. It isn't often that a children's animated movie can make one think along lines like that.