Thomas Pool: For the past 25 years, Cartoon Saloon has been at the forefront of Irish animation. Nominated for several Oscars® and Golden Globes®, as well as picking up BAFTA® and Emmy® wins, your studio has brought Irish animation to audiences around the world. Can you walk us through your history, your mission, and where you’re going next?
Nora Twomey: Having met while studying animation at Ballyfermot College in the 1990s, a dozen of us animators really gelled as creatives, and wanted to draw together and make stories for the screen. We didn’t want to emigrate, as many of our peers were doing at the time, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunities for work in Ireland – although there were, and still are, some great animation companies in Dublin, like Brown Bag and Monster.
Tomm Moore had connections with a great youth organisation in Kilkenny called Young Irish Filmmakers (YIFM) and he, along with Aidan Harte (who has gone on to become a highly acclaimed sculptor and writer) had an idea for a film about the creation of The Book of Kells. Having graduated from college, we started out in YIFM’s premises with a small FAS grant they had applied for on our behalf, one computer and a number of animation desks, bought from a studio that was closing down in Dublin. Tomm, Paul Young, and the whole team learned everything about starting a business and making films the hard way, but our passion for drawing, animation and storytelling remains the same as it was when we were sitting on those front steps in Ballyfermot College in the mid-90s, sharing sketchbooks and ideas.
Cartoon Saloon has seen some challenging times as well as great successes. Stretching ourselves between business and artistic tasks has been less and less of a problem as the years have gone on and we’ve been able to expand to include a great team in the studio, led by our managing director Gerry Shirren, Catherine Roycroft our Chief Operations Officer, and Katja Schumann our Head of Production, along with so many heads of departments who work together to help us all get our best work onto the screen.
We aim to create brave stories, beautifully told. These stories connect with audiences around the world. The range of expertise within the company means we can find ways to deepen our fans’ experiences, for instance, by providing an ethically made plush toy of ‘Baba Puffin’ from the acclaimed preschool series Puffin Rock, so little ones can continue their relationship with our characters at home without negatively impacting the environment, or by seeking partnerships with AppleTV+ and Netflix, so that more people across the globe can enjoy films like Wolfwalkers and My Father’s Dragon.
Could you outline some of the more intricate details of the production process? What goes into making your animations – from concept to premiere?
Animation takes a really long time to make, but the resulting films are, in ways, more timeless than live action – especially 2D animation, where the use of technology is not so apparent, so digital rendering that was cutting edge at the time of a 3D film’s release but has since aged, are not obvious. Different studios have other methods, depending on whether they are specialising in 3D, Cut-Out, Stop Motion, or any number of mixed-media methods, but Cartoon Saloon primarily produces 2D, hand-drawn animation.
We generally spend anywhere between six months to a year in a feature film screenplay stage, reworking the story for at least five drafts to make sure it’s as good as we can get it, inviting notes and input from a select group of story experts to craft it into something brave and beautiful. Financing the film can take a lot of time; identifying co-producers and financing partners can take years. There are specific markets for animation financing around the world that a lot of producers attend to make connections and get screenplays into production.
If we manage to get that screenplay fully greenlit for production, the storyboard team will then work under the direction of the Head of Story and Director to visualise the whole film. Again, we’ll do several versions of the storyboard, as often, narrative problems and solutions reveal themselves in the storyboard and edit phases. In animated films, the editing happens before the animation, as you can’t shoot ‘coverage’ like you do in live action, because it would be way too expensive. In animation you choose your staging in storyboard and stick to it once the animatic (the edited storyboard made into a storyboard movie) is complete.
We record the voice actors in the storyboard stage, but for the first few versions of the storyboard, we do a temporary soundtrack using our crew’s voice performance as a temporary measure, as we tend to change lines of dialogue in the storyboard stage a lot. Then it goes into a number of preparatory stages leading to animation: environment painting (which is often a blend of traditional and digital media), FX animation, compositing the animation and environments together, rendering, and then the frames are ready.
Simultaneously with the last few stages, the Sound Editors and Designers are working on the Foley and sound effects, working with the score composer to create an aural-scape that fits the visuals. The sound is mixed, the picture graded, and then the whole business of promoting the film begins, which is a whole other job and needs to be strategically planned to make sure the film will be released and seen in the best possible way with the resources that we and our partners have.
You work with prestigious clients, like Netflix and Disney (on the recent Star Wars Visions series) as well as fellow Kilkenny-based company, Lighthouse Studios (on The Bob’s Burgers Movie). How does Cartoon Saloon balance these projects with your own original productions? Do you see Cartoon Saloon maintaining this balance in the future, or prioritising one over the other?
Cartoon Saloon and Lighthouse Studios work completely independently in terms of the projects we produce, but we do collaborate and share expertise a lot when it comes to trying to maintain animator’s job security, as the animation industry is subject to ebb and flow like all sectors. We really try as best we can to provide work for those who choose to come and work in Kilkenny. There are now a number of smaller studios in Kilkenny too, like Distillery Films, and a lot of freelancing individuals who work from home for global studios as well as locally.
In Cartoon Saloon, we’ve always tried to maintain a balance between the work where we own or retain no IP, and our projects that originated within the studios that we’ve managed to co-finance with partners around the world. Both types of work provide us with lots of opportunities and learning, and the more we have established ourselves as a design and storytelling force, the more likely potential partners come to Cartoon Saloon to do what we do best, for our distinctive style and not to try to make us into something else. I’m glad of that, because for the early years, especially when we were producing commercials for advertising agencies, we were asked to do styles of design and animation that weren’t aligned with our sensibilities. The start we got with YIFM meant we were under less pressure to accept any job that came along because we had very low overheads, and that allowed us to establish our own artistic voice with short films and then our first feature films.
How do you see the animation industry evolving in Ireland over the next decade?
It’s great to see such a strong industry in Ireland as regards films, series, games, and emerging creative technologies. The investments made by the government through Section 481 incentives, Screen Ireland, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) as well as IDA Ireland, and Enterprise Ireland training and investment supports, have all paid dividends in a sustainable, highly skilled and forward-thinking workforce. The term ‘punching above our weight’ is used a lot with live action and animation successes for Irish-trained talent, representing a country whose population is a fraction of the size of most of the world’s major cities.
There’s a unique blend of our location on the edge of Europe, our global awareness, our connection to both our own culture and that of cultures around the world – where we sent our young and continue to send them in the current cost of living crisis. This all adds to the story of Irish creativity and empathy that I think is really positive. In the face of the challenges and opportunities being presented with Artificial Intelligence (AI), among other things, I have as little ability to predict the future of the industry as the next person, but it’ll be interesting, that’s for sure.
Nora Twomey is a Co-founder and Creative Director of Cartoon Saloon and an Academy Award® Nominated Director.
