Cartoon Saloon’s Nora Twomey on My Father’s Dragon

Across four Oscar-nominated animated features, Kilkenny-based studio Cartoon Saloon have staked their claim for being the best in the world today. With their bright, storybook fable illustrations and maturely emotional storytelling, The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), The Breadwinner (2017) and Wolfwalkers (2020) have won the studio widespread acclaim. But it’s not critical raves that director and studio co-founder Nora Twomey most cares about. “I’m really keen for children’s reactions. When you don’t have children standing up all the way through or talking, that’s proof the story is connecting.”

Twomey’s latest feature, My Father’s Dragon, had just had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival when I got on the phone with her. An adaptation of Ruth Stiles Gannett’s classic children’s novel, the story follows Elmer (Jacob Tremblay), a young boy whose idyllic rural life with his mother (Golshifteh Farahani) running a convenience store gets upended by an economic downturn, forcing them to move to gloomy, grey Nevergreen. Here the pair struggle to get by, and Elmer’s mother finds it ever harder to keep up the façade that things will be ok. After an argument with his mother, Elmer ends up on a quest to the magical but slowly sinking Wild Island in order to rescue a captured dragon, Boris (Gaten Matarazzo).

Twomey had designs on bringing the book to life for nearly a decade, even before she started work on her previous Cartoon Saloon film as director, The Breadwinner. “Back in 2012, I was approached by Julie Lynn, one of our producers, because she had read the book when she was small and then shared it with her children. It was the kind of children’s fiction that wasn’t taking children for granted or talking down to them.”

This was especially important to Twomey. Cartoon Saloon’s works have gained a reputation for being mature family animations, rich with emotional and thematic complexities that trust their target audience don’t need the mood punctured with a lame joke or pat happy ending. “Children will always find something to challenge them,” notes Twomey. “Doesn’t matter if you try to protect them from it, because they’ll find them anyway. Your job as a storyteller is to help them find ways to deal with those things.” During the initial pre-production phase, she read the book to her own children – “watching them express their joy, their fears, their emotions at the storytelling” – as a means of figuring out her approach to the adaptation. 

My Father’s Dragon is the most explicitly kid-centric movie that Cartoon Saloon have yet made, but its exploration of the existential anxiety that sets in once you realise your parents don’t have all the answers will resonate with viewers of any age group. And you don’t need to be any particular age to appreciate the gorgeous bedtime-story visuals Twomey and her team have crafted to tell the tale. The use of evolving colour palettes – the luscious golden tones of Elmer and his mother’s old home give way to the muted blues of industrial Nevergreen, bioluminescent plant caves near green forests, and ever-deepening shades as Wild Island sinks further into the sea – is a remarkably effective non-verbal storytelling device.

Twomey credits art director Áine Mc Guinness, who’d previously worked in the art department on Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015), as a key component of that look. “Áine collaborated with Ciaran Duffy, co-director on The Breadwinner, to create thumbnail caps of the entire film. Every single scene, every shot, we took a little thumbnail of and made a work-cut from. That way we could track the emotional arc of the film and then attach the colours which fit the scene. But it’s also down to our art teams, our colour graders, who all do such a fantastic job.”

But that job became far harder when the pandemic broke out midway through production. For all the added difficulty and isolation in working remotely, particularly it being “harder to help somebody physically when they have a weight on their shoulders,” Twomey also recognises that having a project like this provided the team something to focus on away from the worldwide uncertainty. “Work gave us some kind of unity, and it gave everybody their own thing to do. I have to give props to our production manager and our coordinators who helped us through.”

My Father’s Dragon is the studio’s first collaboration with Netflix and their deep pockets also added a sense of security. “Every other production we’ve done has been a co-production in either Europe or Canada, which means you have a lot of restrictions in terms of budget and what you can do with production,” Twomey explains. She admits that the built-in distribution model also influenced her crafting of the film. “The fact that you can just pick a film and hit play… as a storyteller, I wanted My Father’s Dragon to be accessible to as many people as possible.”

While it’s a shame that the result of their labours won’t be playing on many cinema screens, hopefully the streamer’s algorithm will provide the additional reach that Twomey and her crew deserve.

My Father’s Dragon had its world premiere at the 66th BFI London Film Festival. It is streaming on Netflix from 11 November.