Her voice parts are footnotes. Nora Twomey matters as the Cartoon Saloon director who gives children's animation hard subjects and a child's-eye practicality, and The Breadwinner (2017) shows how well that works when the fantasy stays out of the way.
Fi1m perspective
In The Breadwinner (2017) a girl cuts her hair, dresses as a boy and goes out to buy food, because if she does not, nobody in the house eats. That is the Twomey habit: give a child a job that cannot wait, and let the politics arrive as obstacles between her and the market. Parvana lives under Taliban rule and the film never softens that, but it never lectures either. The restrictions are things a child bumps into during a day, and that is why they land.
She came to this the long way round. Twomey left school at fifteen and worked in a vegetable-processing factory, where the noise meant earplugs and headphones and no conversation, and where, she has said, "I'd just make up stories and entertain myself with beginnings, middles and ends in my head for those 12 hours." Ballyfermot followed, then Brown Bag Films, then in 1999 she founded Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny with Tomm Moore and Paul Young. The shorts From Darkness (2002) and Backwards Boy (2004) came first. She shares the director's credit on The Secret of Kells (2009), was head of story and voice director on Song of the Sea (2014), and The Breadwinner was her first feature alone. My Father's Dragon (2022) followed.
The work is hand-drawn, and she likes to set two styles against each other: flat, coloured, geometric shapes for what a child imagines, darker and more textured drawing for the world she has to live in. In The Breadwinner the second half of that pairing is the film. It frightened us more than we expected a drawn film to, and most of the credit belongs to Saara Chaudry, whose Parvana is stubborn and plainly spoken and never asks to be pitied. The imagined sequences are the weaker half; every time the film leaves the street for the story Parvana tells, it loses a little of its grip and has to earn it back. Voice work is her quiet strength as a director, which fits, since directing voices was her job on Song of the Sea and her casts talk to each other like people who have met.
Her own voice parts are small and were meant to be. She is Bridget, the head housekeeper, in Wolfwalkers (2020), and part of the crowd noise in Kells; we did not notice her in either, which is the job done properly. The reservations that follow her are mild, mostly about pacing and about squeezing a dense book into something a child can follow, and My Father's Dragon drew more of them than The Breadwinner did.
What we would like next is plain enough. Another film that trusts a child with a hard day and does not send her off into a story halfway through it.
Biography
Nora Twomey is an Irish animator, director and producer. She co-founded the animation studio Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny City, Ireland, in 1999. She studied at Ballyfermot College and began her career directing short films including From Darkness (2002) and Cúilín Dualach (2004).
Twomey co-directed The Secret of Kells (2009) with Tomm Moore and provided additional voices for the film. She was head of story and voice director on Song of the Sea (2014). She directed The Breadwinner (2017) and My Father's Dragon (2022). Her work on The Secret of Kells and The Breadwinner received Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature.
