Four-year-old Ben lives in a lighthouse on an isolated Irish island with his father, pregnant mother and dog Cú. One evening the mother mysteriously disappears, leaving behind an infant, Saoirse. On Saoirse’s sixth birthday her grandmother finds her on the beach, shivering with cold and wrapped in white sealskin. Her father angrily throws the skin into the sea, and the grandmother takes the children to live with her in the city. Ben realises that his sister is the last selkie, a creature half human half seal, and the only one who can help the faeries bewitched into rocks. But she needs her sealskin to do that. Coming to his sister’s help, Ben embarks on an exciting adventure into the world of mythological creatures his mother told him about.
“I read a book called The People of the Sea, which was just a collection of all the stories from Scotland and Ireland. It just seemed like they were obviously allegories for loss. It seemed like those coastal communities had kind of invented these fairy tales as a way to deal with loss and I thought that was something that was worth trying to update and do a modern retelling of those stories.” (Tomm Moore)
Tomm Moore
Born in 1977 in Newryu, Ireland, Moore is an illustrator, cartoonist and filmmaker. He graduated in classical animation from the Ballyfermot College and subsequently co-founded the Cartoon Saloon studio. He works in classical 2D animation, and draws his themes and visual motifs from the wealth of Irish historical and cultural tradition. Both of his films, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, won the prestigious Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.
filmography
2009 The Secret of Kells
2014 Song of the Sea