The Secret of Kells (2009)

The film that set the studio's look, which Tomm Moore described as flat, with false perspective and lots of color, built from the knotwork and margins of the Book of Kells itself. Brendan, a boy in the abbey of Kells in early ninth-century Ireland, is caught between Abbot Cellach's wall against Viking raids and Brother Aidan, an illuminator who has fled Iona. The forest fairy Aisling and the pre-Christian god Crom Cruach bring older Ireland into the frame, and the Crom Cruach sequence is a genuinely unsettling piece of abstract animation. At 79 minutes it is the quickest way into the studio, with Brendan Gleeson as Cellach and a score by Bruno Coulais with Kíla. Co-directed with Nora Twomey, it earned the studio its first Oscar nod.