by Brendan Foley
When you’re a kid, you are a world unto yourself. All of existence is focused through you, and only you, with friends, family, and all of the rest of reality filtered entirely by how they relate to and benefit you. And every emotion is a storm, a hurricane that washes over your entire being. When you’re sad, that sorrow consumes every sensation, every experience. When you’re angry, it’s a blinding, almost feral rage.
The journey to adulthood, hopefully, entails widening that worldview to include empathy for other people. And it will hopefully include a period of maturation that allows you to process complex emotional reactions, instead of the deeply felt outbursts of joy and sadness and love and hate.
Song of the Sea is a gentle fable of awe-inspiring power, and it details just such a journey. In protagonist Ben’s quest to liberate the imprisoned fairy folk of Ireland, it captures something honest about the process of moving past yourself and embracing love, messy/destructive/transformative love.
Coming from Tomm Moore, co-director of The Secret of Kells, Sea opens with young Ben spending a happy evening with his father and very pregnant mother. His mother regales the boy with tales of folklore, of spirits and fairies, and giants and cruel witches, and of the selkies, a sort of Irish mermaid. Selkies are women who possess magical coats that allow them to take on the bodies of seals. But the happy idyll is shattered when the mother flees from the house, leaving behind only a beautiful baby girl.
Time passes and when we rejoin Ben, he’s an angry boy, boiling over with fear and resentment. Much of that resentment is directed at his little sister, Saoirse, who has yet to speak a single word even though she is almost six years old. Ben’s father is a broken man, haunted by grief and loss, and the whole family is dominated by Ben’s grandmother, a woman so consumed with ‘protecting’ the family that she restricts their every moment and movement.
It all changes when Saoirse stumbles upon a magical white coat that, once put on, opens up her and the rest of the family to the attention of the hidden spirits of Ireland, sending brother and sister on a journey through the magic and monsters of their own backyard.
This is Moore’s second film, and when compared with Kells, you can see a singular approach beginning to emerge. Both films deal extensively with specifically-Irish history and folklore, and both films have an ease with magic and spirituality that Hollywood is often confounded by. Spirits and magic co-exist alongside the children of Moore’s film, and very little is made of this fact. Magic is random and unruly, as like to smash you upon the rocks of some dark god as it is to left you into the sky.
But, more, there’s a gentleness to Moore’s films, a sense of quiet and calm that’s utterly alien to the frenetic pacing of most children’s film. When was the last time you saw a cartoon that was willing to take a moment to watch the wind blow through the grass, or that turned down the soundtrack long enough to let you hear the waves on a beach or the rustle of leaves? You’d have to go to Hayao Mizayaki to find another animator as comfortable with quiet as Moore and his team.
And with Sea, they’ve taken their approach to Secret of Kells and used it to tell a story that is fueled entirely by heart. I loved Kells, but its abstract art style had a (slight, very slight) distancing effect. Song of the Sea is every bit as gorgeous as that film, but they’ve toned down the crazy fractal art style and created a representation of Dublin and the Irish countryside that feels lived in and specific. Of course, that specific and down-to-earth world is invaded by hosts of loopy spirits and monsters, but the contrast serves to elevate and enhance the dizzying weirdness.
And in Ben, Moore and writer Will Collins have hit upon a lead character that’s unlike most any other in children’s films. See, Ben’s a shit. He’s impulsive, short-tempered, hostile to his adorable sister, more than a little cowardly, and tunnel-visioned to his own wants and needs. He is, essentially, the perfect representation of a young boy with an even younger sibling.
And man, does that hit home. I have four younger siblings, and growing up, there was no one I loved more, and no one who made me angrier than I ever thought possible. Having the same people around you day after day, looking up to you, following you around, it’s an incredible responsibility that, to a young person, is also an incredible pain in the ass. Song of the Sea gets that, and it doesn’t apologize for the shitty things Ben does.
The journey of the film is as much about Ben’s emotional awakening as it is a physical walk from one place to another. When Ben realizes that Saoirse is in danger, something wakes up inside of him and he finds himself letting go of his own baggage in order to save his sister. If you’ve read this far, you can probably guess what the grand dramatic gesture that signifies this renewed sibling love will be. Doesn’t matter. As ‘predictable’ that beat might be, it still left me a teary-eyed mess.
That’s the strange magic of Moore’s films. The art is stylized to the point of abstraction, right down to the characters which are often masses of lines and circles that move in ways no flesh and blood body could possibly manage. But as divorced from reality as the images may be, they strike at something pure, something honest, something profoundly human. These fantasies understand reality in a way that’s both deceptive and ultimately devastating, and Song of the Sea’s closing moments are both rapturously beautiful, yet also haunting and truly moving.
Song of the Sea is available both on home media and streaming on Amazon. I urge you to seek it out.