Wolfwalkers (2020)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Princess Mononoke took place in Ireland?

Medieval Kilkenny is harvesting more than its fair share of the nearby forest for lumber, and the swirling liquidy pack of wolves that reside in the wood take it personally. Two mystical wolf-witches call off the horde just before it devours a lumberjack, and heal him with their swirly witchy powers. His lumberjack friends will never believe this.

The Lord Protector, a right British twat, relocates an English wolf hunter to Kilkenny to take care of the wolven threat. The hunter commands his young huntress-in-training daughter to stay indoors while he's out, as the townsfolk are not particularly keen on the new English residents.

The anti-authoritarian little huntress-to-be ignores all instructions and runs off into the woods with her pet falcon. Upon seeing a swirling liquid wolf pack, she promptly shoots her falcon right to death.

The lesser wolf-witch snatches the bird corpse and runs off.

Little huntress spends the next couple of days trying to track them down, in case the birdy wasn't shot fully to death. She finds him fit and healthy, and promptly makes friends with the lesser wolf-witch. The little witch shows the huntress that she becomes a wolf when her human body sleeps. Her big-witch mother has been out on a mission in wolf form for an uncomfortably long time, and little wolf is concerned and lonely.

The little wolf accidentally bites the little huntress, but magically heals her immediately. Immediately isn't immediate enough, and the huntress becomes a wolfwalker herself. This leads to some general upset when her wolf form pops out right in front of her wolf-hunting father, and leads to the town escalating into full-blown wolf warfare.

The art is generally colorful, soft, curvy, and swirly, in a manner quite reminiscent of Samurai Jack, and with wide urban shots pulled straight out of a Castlevania video game.

In times of excitement, it transitions to rougher drawings and line art, breaking some sort of animation fourth wall as the sketch lines spill right out of the figures. It's wonderfully stylized, with a strong "storybook art" sense.

Tensions rise between Irish and English, village and wolf, father and daughter, and wolf-girl and human-girl as misunderstandings and miscommunications compound. The Lord Protector tries to take command of the situation by staging a public execution of a captured she-wolf – the young wolfwalker's missing mother – but it all goes sideways.

The hunter father, torn between daughter and duty, triggers the climax by shooting the she-wolf to death. This sends his distraught daughter off into a permanent state of werewolf. Immediately regretting his decision, the father goes super-saiyan werewolf himself to save his now-wolf daughter from the rampaging English idiot and send the soldiers scurrying.

A big, hearty pack awooooo has just enough magic to save wolf-mum and usher in the next era of the wolf pack.

As in Princess Mononoke, an ancient force of nature is guarded imperfectly by a pissy human-wolf blend. As in Princess Mononoke, the pissy wolf protector tries to scare off the stubborn but noble-hearted human hero, presuming the hero to be similar in temperament to the villainous nature-destroying humans. As in Princess Mononoke, a stark distinction is laid out between the unintentionally destructive force of widespread human expansion versus the highly-intentional destructive force of individual greed. As in Princess Mononoke, a new but still-tenuous agreement of coexistence is reached between humans and nature after the humans overstep their bounds and briefly witness the horrors of imbalance.

Unlike in Princess Mononoke, everyone becomes a cute puppy!