Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
“Come away oh human child,
To the waters and the wild,
with a fairy hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Animator Tomm Moore shot to international prominence in 2009 when The Secret of Kells (which he wrote the story for and co-directed with Nora Twomey) earned a surprising nomination for Best Animated Feature, placing the tiny, intimate Kells on the same stage as popular hits from Disney and Pixar (it lost to Up, which… I mean, fair).
For his follow-up (and first solo directorial credit), Moore continued to mine Ireland’s rich history of Celtic lore for both story and style. But whereas The Secret of Kells places the fairies and spirits of the Emerald Isle into a historical context of Vikings and early monks, Song of the Sea’s fair folk are stuck eking out a living alongside a modern, urban Ireland that has no patience or time for owls that serve witches, great kings frozen in stone, or selkies who have lost their voice.
That last point is of great importance to young Ben (David Rawle in the English cast, James Ó Floinn in the Irish). When Ben was just a toddler, his happy family life was destroyed one fateful night when his very pregnant mother disappeared into a storm, leaving only a tiny baby girl wrapped in a luminous coat. Six years later, Ben’s father Conor (Brendan Gleeson) is a broken man, his grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) is determined to ‘fix’ the family, and his sister Saoirse has still yet to say a word, her silent presence a constant irritation.
But Ben’s world is turned upside down after another fateful night, when Saoirse discovers her true nature as a selkie (a sort of mermaid out of Irish folklore, selkies are shapeshifters that appear as both women and seals). As the last selkie, Saoirse rapidly comes to the attention of powerful forces of both light and dark, and it’s up to Ben to help his sister bring peace not only to the world of gods and spirits, but to their own broken little family.
Did you get a chance to watch along with us this week? Want to recommend a great (or not so great) film for the whole gang to cover? Comment below or post on our Facebook or hit us up on Twitter!
Next Week’s Pick:
It’s time for a brand new series to coincide with the opening of a new school year! Class is in session with a lineup of school and student-themed comedies from ranging 1979 to 2017. We’re kicking off with the raucous, infectiously joyful Rock n Roll High School, conceived and directed by Allan Arkush with Joe Dante, and featuring The Ramones!
8/31 — Rock n Roll High School
9/07 — Don’t Talk to Irene
9/14 — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
9/21 — Back to School
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
The more I watch Song of the Sea, the more certain I am that it’s a bone fide masterpiece. Even distinct from the best of Pixar (who I *love*, but their function-first narrative philosophy means that you can really see the gears turning at times), there’s a whimsical and organic nature to the film’s storytelling while still being perfectly on-key.
For instance, the movie isn’t just about love and kindness, it’s specifically about empathy. Notably, about the empathy that children develop for others in order to become functional human beings, demonstrated here by Ben’s attitude towards his little sister. However, as easy as it might be to simply sell an arc on “be nice to people, especially the ones you love,” Tomm Moore and his team spend a lot of the film showing you that empathy is also a path that leads to pain. A happy, loving family is shattered in a single night, a mother is so heartbroken by her child’s suffering that she becomes a monster, and an entire world could die because living in it can be so very hard.
The film’s approach to this is less about belaboring points on soap boxes than letting the themes wash over the viewer, so that elements like the the Wizard of Oz/Peter Pan-esque “double-casting” of characters feels not just natural, but inevitable. The world is just the world, and the story moves just as surely in the smaller in-between spaces along the journey. Our heroes are every bit as likely to have a “symbolic story beat” in a roundabout or at a rusty gate as they are on a stormy cliff or a witch’s lair, adding to an authenticity that is both counter to — yet also utterly true to — the exaggerated flat art style. And because of this leg work during smaller steps, the biggest moments in Song of the Sea land like a meteor.
Because after seeing exactly how hard it is to love, and how awful it is to bottle everything up rather than feel it, a young boy sheds the armor that separated him from his family and “protected” him from the waters that caused his family’s ruin, and faces his greatest fear…for love. But for all its rightness and heroism, it’s still not a choice devoid of hurt.
And that’s why it’s the right one.
After all, you can choose not to feel for those around you, choose not to care because it might be hard and it might hurt, and you can hide behind walls and money and cold iron instead of giving a damn about anyone else. But if that’s how you choose to “live,” you may as well be made of stone. (@BLCAgnew)
You know when you were a kid and you lost yourself in those beautiful water colored picture books? The world was on the page, and the story was contained in between two covers but in your imagination everything lived on.
Song of the Sea evokes that feeling in every frame. It feels like a wonderful storybook come to life, brimming with imagination. This is how I imagined the worlds of my favorite books as a kid popping to life.
At the same time, this feels like a love letter to old Celtic tales. There is an understanding and love that comes through here that reminds me of how you understand how much Guillermo del Toro loves monsters within his films.
The best way to describe Song of the Sea? Luscious. (@hsumra)
The Team
I more or less demanded we do this movie immediately after learning that it had hit Netflix. I love The Secret of Kells, but I flat out adore Song of the Sea, as powerful a meditation on the place that myth holds in reality, that grief holds in joy, and that death holds in life as any of the masterworks from maestros like Guillermo del Toro, Hayao Miyazaki, Neil Gaiman, the list goes on and on. It’s not just that the film is heart-stoppingly beautiful (though it is) or mesmerizing to behold (though it is), and it’s not just that it’s a wonderful “magic in the backyard” adventure story (though it is), or that the film’s emotional core is so pure, so beautifully and immediately rendered, that it’s nigh impossible to get through certain scenes without crying (every time, man, Every. Time.).
No, what makes Song of the Sea so special to me, like Kubo and the Two Strings, is the way the film speaks powerfully to the way stories (and Story itself) are used to connect us, here and now, with the people who have come before and the people who will come after. Song of the Sea understands how the smallest of things (a hummed tune, a particular character out of a tale) can linger in your mind and bind you and all your past selves together into a whole. For Ben, the story of his family, its tragedies and secrets and triumphs, is the story of Ireland, all connected in a narrative that spans both millennia and entire whole worlds. It’s a transcendentally beautiful idea, and one that the film illustrates with note-perfect clarity. I love this film, that is all. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
Maybe this makes me the monster of the group, but I didn’t like The Secret of the Kells. Now it’s been awhile so I don’t really recall the reason, but despite the beautiful animation, I grew tired of its dense mythology, perhaps because I’m not familiar with the lore, and eventually stopped watching and never returned.
So it was with some trepidation and disinterest that I approached Song of the Sea, co-opting evening cartoon time with the kids (currently making our way through Gravity Falls) to watch this as a family.
The difference was immediate. Song of the Sea presents its rich lore in an approachable and straightforward fashion, providing everything the audience needs understand the tale in its opening narrative. The animation is stunning, and serves as a wonderful medium and style for the fantastical elements of the story, which work in concert with the setting of modernity to create a space where our world hides a secret one — a fairy might inhabit any shrub or stone, an island or mountain might be a sleeping giant, and you might even know a mermaid of sorts — a woman or girl who can turn to a seal when entering in the ocean.
This is ultimately a story about family, with the difficulties and heartache that that can entail. This will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, dealt with a cantankerous parent or grandparent, or even squabbled with a sibling. Bring a hankie. (@VforVashaw)
Next week’s pick:
