What You Missed: Cartoon Saloon Adapting ‘The Breadwinner’ as Their Next Film

Welcome to another installment in the What You Missed series.

For those uninitiated, this is a series of news stories that fell off our radar during the 2014 year in animation. So consider this a way of catching up with the stories you may have missed out on.

Cartoon Saloon’s The Breadwinner

In the span of just two films, the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon has become one of the brighter new talents in animation to watch, and heavily championed by those fighting to keep the craft of 2D animation alive.

Despite recently celebrating their Oscar nomination for Song of the Sea, its sights are firmly set on their next feature film.

Cartoon Brew reported back in December that Cartoon Saloon’s next film will be an adaptation of Deborah Ellis’s 2000 bestselling novel The Breadwinner. The film had been announced the previous weekend at the Irish VFX and Animation Summit by the studio’s co-founder Paul Young. Nora Twomey, who co-directed The Secret of Kells and is a key member of Cartoon Saloon, will make her solo debut as director while Ellis will team up with Anita Doron to write the screenplay.

The film (and the novel its based on) follow Parvana, an 11-year-old girl who is forced by circumstance to disguise herself as a boy in a war-torn, Taliban-era Afghanistan in order to provide for her family.

Cartoon Saloon is not one to shy away from stories involving sensitive topics and subject matter. The clash of two very different religions factor heavily into the storyline of The Secret of Kells, while Song of the Sea is an environmental fable in the Miyazaki tradition, steeped in Ireland’s folklore and driven by the theme of loss. Simply put, their ability to chase after ideas and concepts that normally wouldn’t get touched by other animation studios is commendable.

When interviewed by Cartoon Brew a few weeks back, Tomm Moore mentioned that The Breadwinner is “trying to involve two styles again, one based on traditional Afghan art and 2D animation that represents the real world of Afghanistan.”

The film is budgeted at $10 Million and will be made as a co-production with Toronto, Canada-based Aircraft Pictures with the backing of Irish Film Board, Telefilm Canada, non-profit organizations and private investors from the United States and the Middle East.

Production on the film will begin this Spring with a theatrical release set for 2017.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to the film?

Edited by: Morgan Stradling