The Secret of Kells (2009)

The biggest surprise of the past year's Academy Awards wasn't the triumph of Kathryn Bigelow or the ominous inclusion of "The Blind Side" to the Best Picture lineup, but rather the nomination of a little Irish film known as "The Secret of Kells," with barely any screenings to its name. The question at the tip of everybody's tongue became: what was the Academy thinking? Yet once "Kells" emerged quietly onto the moviehouse scene, people began to understand. In a year where 3-D glasses and grand IMAX screenings dominated the box office, one can't help but feel that the Academy members that voted for it were onto something, a form of silent rebellion against all things big and explosive.It's rare that the visual components of a film can so completely saturate its entire being. Indeed, the Irish fairytale story seems to exist wholly for the sumptuous drawings depicting it. A flighty little nymph sprite, with her white hair blowing spiritedly in the wind, guides ribbons of smoke along the geometric curlicues of the screen. Armed with nothing but a pencil, Brendan battles the fearsome Krom Kruit as he catapults himself within a milky plasmatic nebula. And then there are the montages, some whimsical, like filigreed clockwork, some impressionistic, like a smudgy Renoir painting, and some brilliantly naturalistic, featuring jeweled leaves with verdure smeared all over its surface.Yet although "Kells" features scenes heavily laden with Irish mysticism and subversively pagan rituals, the film could essentially double as a social allegory for modern film industry. Brother Aidan says dishearteningly to Cellach: "You've forgotten how important it is. All you want for us is this wall!" Just replace "it" with "hand-drawing" and "wall" with "hyper-explosive 3-D graphics," and you've got yourself the perfect antidote to James Cameron and his devoted followers. With a run time of little more than an hour, "Kells" is a refreshingly different take on classic animation, lovingly and defiantly flattened into two dimensions, inspiringly simple - and more than a little trippy. By paying homage to an ancient time where beauty and patience inevitably won out over brute force, the film blends a straightforward morality with sophisticated hand-drawings to stunning visual effect. Truly, it practices what it preaches.