**Spoilers**
Ever since I had first viewed Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea back in 2015, our local, Kilkenny-based animation studio, Cartoon Saloon had filled me with both a personal sense of pride for Ireland’s steadily growing animation scene as well as a general wonder and awe for international animated cinema as a whole, given the studio’s multiple nominations at the academy awards. The fact that the studio doesn’t conform to Disney’s contemporary 3D model of animation like the grand majority of Hollywood animation studios nowadays gives me a newfound optimism that 2D animation in contemporary cinema hasn’t been completely supplanted. However, as much as the studio’s previous productions under Tom Moore, The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014) have held a firm place in my heart, they mostly came across as straightforward but loving tributes to Hayao Miyazaki’s style of mythology-themed, visual-driven animation, but didn’t provide a particularly deep narrative vision outside of that. All that being said, however, their 2017 production, and solo debut under Nora Twomey, The Breadwinner had exceeded my expectations tremendously, as it confronts, with brutal honesty, surprisingly mature and very real cultural issues that its more accessible predecessors would, at times, touch upon, but not explore too in-depth.
