Tomm Moore

Biography

At fourteen Tomm Moore visited Don Bluth's studio in Ireland with his friend Ross Stewart and met the director himself. Bluth and Hayao Miyazaki were the filmmakers he looked to as a child.

Moore was born on 7 January 1977 in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland, the eldest of four children. He moved with his family to Kilkenny when he was very small; his father worked as an engineer. He became interested in animation at about eleven or twelve. As a teenager he joined Young Irish Film Makers in Kilkenny, a studio where young people learn digital animation and make their first films. After secondary school at St Kieran's College he studied classical animation at Ballyfermot College of Further Education in Dublin. He founded Cartoon Saloon with Paul Young and Nora Twomey in his last year there, in 1998 (by another account, 1999). At first the studio was housed next to Young Irish Film Makers but soon outgrew the premises. Its first major project was the television series Skunk Fu! (2007–2008); by other accounts his own part in it was small. In the same year, 1998, Moore worked as production designer on the television film The Hawthorn Hedge, after the novel Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna, about three teenagers crossing Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845.

In those same years he was drawing comics. Two graphic novels in Irish, An Sclábhaí (“the slave”, 2001) and An Teachtaire (“the messenger”, 2003), tell the story of Saint Patrick; the script was by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh, and they were published by Cló Mhaigh Eo. Later Moore made a two-volume graphic novel based on his own film The Secret of Kells. Reviewers noted its stylisation after medieval Irish miniatures and its gentle humour. He also worked on other people’s projects: as an artist on Nora Twomey’s short film Cúilín Dualach (2004) and as an animator on the feature film The Three Kings (2003), directed by Antonio Navarro.

Moore directed his first feature film together with Nora Twomey. The Secret of Kells (2009) is built on the legend of the Book of Kells, the manuscript that Irish monks produced around 800; the action is set in ninth-century Ireland. The screenplay was by Fabrice Ziolkowski from a story by Moore and Aidan Harte, the music by Bruno Coulais, with the band Kíla. The film is hand-drawn and was made jointly with French and Belgian studios and the television channel France 2. It premiered on 8 February 2009 at the Berlin International Film Festival, or, by other accounts, on 30 January in Gérardmer. It won audience awards at Annecy and Edinburgh and the Irish Film and Television Award for best animation, and in 2010 it was nominated for an Academy Award.

Moore completed Song of the Sea (2014) as director without a co-director, with music again by Coulais. The film is based on legends of the selkies, seal people. It too was nominated for an Academy Award, and it won the Irish Film and Television Award for best film and the Reuben Award of the National Cartoonists Society in the United States. In the same year Moore and Ross Stewart directed one segment of the collective film The Prophet, after the book by Kahlil Gibran; Roger Allers supervised the project as a whole. Both of the 2014 films were shown in Toronto.

He announced his next work, Wolfwalkers, in November 2015. Moore directed it with Ross Stewart, and in 2020 it was released on Apple TV+. The film completed the trilogy on Irish folklore and won awards from the New York and Los Angeles film critics, two Annie Awards, for directing and for independent feature, and nominations for a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and an Academy Award. It seems to me that what holds the trilogy together is not the plot but a shared graphic language: flat, patterned forms that descend from Celtic miniature painting.