The Book of Kells

I absolutely fell in love with The Secret of Kells. I wanted to wait to write this until after I had watched it again and really been able to pay attention to the details. The depth of every design in the movie is breathtaking, you can see knotwork and ancient Celtic symbols worked into the trees and plants, drawings resembling manuscripts surrounding the characters, colors that remind of the Book of Kells, etc. One subtle thing that I really loved was how many scenes were flat, that is the landscapes and perspective was laid out like a page out of a book, the style was extremely illustrative and hearkened back over and over to the original manuscripts. Even the characters themselves were often a modernized version of the people in the manuscripts. The animals, especially the wolves, looked like they were straight out of the book as well. Another thing was that people and objects would tend to be contained within shapes, such as if you saw a group of people, they were usually all contained within the shape of the person in the back of the group. That really reminded me of some of the detailed shapes within bigger shaps in the Celtic manuscripts. All this rambling can be summed up in saying I think The Book of Kells was one of the most beautiful and inspiring pieces of animation I've ever seen.