Race, difference, and Irish identity in Cartoon Saloon’s 2009 film, The Secret of Kells

Abstract

Cartoon Saloon’s 2009 film, The Secret of Kells, about the making of the ninth-century illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, was widely promoted on its release as the first feature-length animation with an Irish setting and Irish themes. Created in the last decade of the Celtic Tiger and set in Ireland’s early medieval past, the film engages with contemporary and medieval discourses about race and otherness. This discussion examines the film’s interpretation of these discourses for the implied child viewer in twenty-first century Ireland. It begins by contextualising The Secret of Kells as a piece of medievalist children’s fantasy, addressing the historiography of race and difference in the medieval period, before exploring Moore and Twomey’s engagement with these ideas in the context of twenty-first century Ireland. It analyses The Secret of Kells’ ambivalent representation of racial and cultural otherness in the early Middle Ages, expressed through the child protagonist’s encounters with a variety of racial, national, and supernatural “others,” and argues that this representation reflects contemporary conversations about immigration and multiculturalism in Ireland in the 2000s.