Breathless Beauty Within Animated Wonder ‘Song of the Sea’

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Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Just in time for its potential win of the “Best Animated Feature” Oscar this Sunday, the Irish animated film “Song of the Sea” opens this weekend at Chicago’s Music Box Theater. A grab-bag myth come to storytelling life, this film is vitalized by its gorgeous animation as much as the heart within its narrative. An accomplishment that would make the likes of Hayao Miyazaki proud, “Song of the Sea” is a gift to fans of animation.

This animated treasure from the “Secret of Kells” director Tomm Moore is an original story, but based on the Irish folklore of Selkies, creatures that live as seals in the sea, but humans on land. Moore angles his Selkie tale to focus on themes of humans dealing with burrowed grief. In “Song of the Sea,” a father (Conor, voiced by Brendan Gleeson) cares for his children, his pre-teen Ben (David Rawle) and six-year-old mute daughter Saoirse (Lucy O’Connell). The three of them live alone on an island, at the top of a very big hill, in a lighthouse. The family unit has felt incomplete since the passing of the mother, who Ben remembers vividly as a baby, before she left the family after giving birth to Saoirse.

‘Song of the Sea’
Photo credit: GKIDS

Conor’s mother (known as Granny, voiced by Fionnula Flanagan) tries to fix the unit’s sadness by removing the children from their isolated home, and making them live with her. When Ben isn’t allowed to take his delightful dog Cú along with, he and Saoirse escape Granny’s house, and travel back to their father’s island. Though Ben has angst towards his young sister during this journey, he learns about her special Selkie background, and helps her save fairies who have let themselves become stones for the price of losing their difficult emotions. Their feelings are stored by an owl-looking woman named Macha (also voiced by Flanagan).

(Before saying more about “Song of the Sea,” its important to note something that makes this tale specific, right off the bat. A lot of films that involve children, especially when made for children, share a focal point in the presentation of grief. A general glaze over the most popular films of this certain fare, from “Frozen” to “Paddington,” shows that these movies have this strange gravitational pull to make their stories serious. All of this said, “Song of the Sea” is one of the better movies to tackle the subject, as it actually takes on a stance, and ushers it in within a message. And the message isn’t just to age beyond such sad thoughts, but to accept the existence of these awful strange feelings, and live through them.)

“Song of the Sea” is a breathlessly beautiful film that’s also restless to the amount of magic it can squeeze into its narrative. If my plot synopsis above sounded a tiny bit confuzzled, it’s because there is so much happening within Moore’s story. Though the narrative does bring it all home at the end, it’s nonetheless through a million mini-missions brought onto the characters that it reaches such a point. A tale that features mythological seals also features emotional fairies, and then it involves owls for good measure. (And then a secret key, and a special sea shell, and a guy with a beard the size of a room). A concept in screenwriting involves the amount of “magic beans” a story can have — the rule states one, and “Song of the Sea” almost overdoses on its many. While these sincerely-used, important components allot space for gorgeous sequences that contribute to a unique arc, if the animation weren’t so significant, it’s easy to imagine this clutter taking down the beauty of this story with it.

‘Song of the Sea’
Photo credit: GKIDS

But with regards to its center delight, Moore’s special film is assuredly one of baffling animation, whose design is curious in itself. Defined shapes like ovals and squares are prominent amongst heavily-detailed backgrounds that painted with visual depth, and function as set pieces for which the characters navigating within. All is enlivened with an exquisite usage of light, which blends beautifully with watercolors. These images are set along a spare audio experience, in which music plays a very specific part amongst sporadically lonely parts of sound design.

The excitement of “Song of the Sea” is to see this style in its wise movement, as a vigorous imagination constantly conjures a full environment from a sincere place. The takeaways of this film are not just its poetic messages, but in the way that the movie lingers with viewers long after, with a vibrancy that can be found when taking it one shot at a time.

By NICK ALLEN Editor & Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com nick@hollywoodchicago.com