Old Fangs
2010 · 11m · Ireland
Directed by Adrien Merigeau, Alan Holly
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, mythic
A young wolf sets out to confront his father, whom he has not seen since childhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A father-son reconciliation wrapped in wolf fur sounds like exactly the kind of mythic earnestness I'd usually skip, but Merigeau and Holly actually subvert the sentiment—this is a coming-of-age that treats its own tenderness with formal distance, almost cold precision, which somehow makes it stranger and truer.
The film's lineage is palpable—mythic animation in the tradition of folkloric cinema—yet it achieves something formally rigorous in how it uses silence and negative space to explore paternal absence; the restraint is the entire argument, and that's the mark of considered direction.
The animators made the radical choice to render the wolves' movements with a kind of stiffness—neither fully naturalistic nor expressionistic—which turns the body language into the emotional text; it's a constraint that becomes the film's entire gravity.
Reviews
petit bijou du film d'animation dont le trait et le style semblent à première vue éloignés de l'univers « celtique » de Moore mais qui a y regarder de plus près contient déjà de jolies passerelles entre les deux cinéastes.