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Roddy Doyle’s novel for kids, about childhood grief, has been turned into a gorgeous family animation with a big heart, charming without being too sugary. It’s a gentle introduction to death with its non-religious message that in the end, when someone dear to us dies, what we are left with is their love, and what they have shown us about how to love.
A cheeky, flame-haired 12-year-old Dublin girl called Mary, voiced by Mia O’Connor, wants to be a famous chef when she grows up. The movie opens with Mary competing for the summer camp at an elite catering school. When the snooty judges criticise her tarte tartin, Mary’s grandmother Emer (Rosaleen Linehan) lets rips at “the eejits with the clipboards”. Back at home, granny Emer falls ill and is rushed to hospital. The news is not good and, what with her granny being sick, plus hormones, Mary is raging. There’s real warmth in the scenes at home: her exhausted, worried mum Scarlett (Sharon Horgan) doesn’t cook (“this spag bol is about as Italian as Bono”), dad is cheerful taxi driver Paddy (Brendan Gleeson), and there’s two galumphing brothers; everyone drinks endless cups of tea.
The animation is lovely, with hints of Studio Ghibli and a bit of Raymond Briggs’s gentle fuzziness. Things take a turn for the supernatural when Mary meets a young woman called Tansey (Charlene McKenna), dressed in strangely old-fashioned clothes. Slowly it dawns on Mary that Tansey is her great-grandmother: granny Emer’s mammy, who died young in a flu outbreak and is back to take care of her daughter at the end. And this ghost is very good company: funny, lightly sarcastic and awed by the modern world, with its fridges, supermarkets and sliding doors. “What’s wrong with handles?” It’s a tender film that will leave only the chilliest heart unwarmed.