4 Comments

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

The secrets of Brendan Gleeson's success

Tweet

Brendan Gleeson

Every Irish person knows about the Book of Kells, the ninth century manuscript that’s a priceless triumph of the illustrator’s art, but very few Irish people ever bother to line up alongside the tourist hordes to actually take a look at it in any kind of detail themselves.

Like the Blarney Stone or the Giant’s Causeway, most of us are happy enough just to know it’s there. It’s one of the most important artifacts of Irish civilization after all; it’s a part of what makes the Irish who we are.

But there’s no call to go out of your way to actually see the thing, right?

Well, wrong. In The Secret of Kells, the remarkable Oscar nominated Irish animated film starring Brendan Gleeson and Mick Lally (best known as Miley from the Irish soap Glenroe) the Book of Kells provides the inspiration for the storyline, but it does much more than that. It also shapes the look and feel of the finished film, which is, it must be said, utterly beautiful.

In the film young Brendan, a monk in training, lives in a battered outpost under siege from invading foreign barbarians, but adventure suddenly beckons when a celebrated master illuminator arrives, carrying an ancient but unfinished book that Brendan will one day help to complete.

Even if you’ve already seen a trailer for The Secret of Kells, nothing will prepare you for the jaw-dropping marvel that director Tomm Moore has created. Japanese film critics have for decades revered one of their own named Hayao Miyazaki, a maverick director whose animated films have addressed Japanese life and culture.

If the Irish have any sense they’ll see the clear parallels between Miyazaki’s work and Moore’s and they’ll take every measure to ensure his films are funded, promoted and screened worldwide. The reason is that Moore has created a uniquely Irish visual vocabulary, and he’s married that to equally strong storytelling skills.

“It’s mad, we never expected it to go this far,” Moore tells the Irish Voice. “We started animating the film in October 2005 and we finished up in August 2008. We only released the film in Ireland last year. We really didn’t expect to be nominated for an Oscar this year.”

Moore’s surprise is a reminder that in Ireland, even in 2010, you still only really hit the big time when other cultures take notice. But Gleeson, who plays Abbot Cellach, needed no convincing that Moore’s film was the real thing.

“A lot of times people will come up to you and start chatting and it’ll turn out they won’t have the funding for it,” Gleeson tells the Irish Voice (he was in New York to attend the opening of Green Zone, the new Iraq war film in which he stars with Matt Damon).

Print

E-mail

Tweet