The Secret of Kells: Critic Reviews

Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.

It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.

A low-key pleasure.

The Secret of Kells is a magical adventure unlike anything we've seen on screen before.

If filmgoers ultimately feel bogged down in its densely layered fable and allegory, it's a spectacular thicket to get lost in.

A visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.

The soul of the film lies in its ravishing colors, and in exuberantly stylized images that pay homage to Celtic culture and design, together with techniques and motifs that evoke Matisse, Miyazaki and the minimalist cartoons of UPA.

Its hand-drawn two-dimensional animation springs to life with color and meticulous technique, filigreed and curlicued like the luminous book at its center.

I think it will appeal to children young enough to be untutored in boredom, and to anyone old enough to be drawn in, or to appreciate the artistry.

This Irish feature won't impress anyone with its character drawings, but the backgrounds remind us what stunning imagery once resulted from nothing more than a pen and all the time in the world.

The Secret of Kells is gorgeous work, and its imagery and themes dovetail perfectly: a story about creating art, artfully created.

In the end, the film is about a magical book, but you never really have a sense of what makes the book magical.

With its jewel-bright colors and intricate use of lines, the result is absolutely luscious to behold.

It's easy to see how the animation nominators fell in love with this charmer based on Celtic mythology, which is quite unlike anything I've ever seen before.

A gorgeous blend of the magical and the gloriously trippy.

A beguiling kaleidoscopic indulgence for the eyes and soul.

A glorious throwback to the more stylized, painterly work of decades past, the kind of vividly colored, fanciful pictorials that are usually confined to the small-scale realm of animated shorts.

...there's never a point at which the viewer is wholeheartedly drawn into the admittedly simple narrative.

A unique film visually, but the story and characters are a bit weak and the pacing is a bit slow.

Steeped in both magic and mythology, The Secret Of Kells offers a refreshing alternative to Hollywood fare.

Combining a classic fairytale trajectory with a singular aesthetic that fuses Celtic and Christian mythology, this stunning film is yet another example of the rude health of contemporary animation.

Tomm Moore's Irish animation, drawn with painstaking reference to both Celtic myth and medieval manuscripts, possesses a lively originality that shows Europe's animators not far behind America's and in some ways in front of them.

This understated Irish charmer deserves to reach a wider audience, if only to remind people that animation is a diverse medium that can be exploited in numerous ways to tell all sorts of stories.

The look of the film is simply ravishing.

While this is a handsome picture that laudably avoids patronising its audience, it's not always as child-friendly as it might be.