Tomm Moore

Tomm Moore (born 1977) is an Irish animation director and co-founder of Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny studio that has become a global standard-bearer for hand-drawn 2D animation. His “Irish Folklore Trilogy” — The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers, which he co-directed — earned three Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature.

A response to AI

Moore frames Cartoon Saloon’s intensely handcrafted aesthetic as an intentional stand. Speaking in 2023, he described “a journey within the studio towards something that could only be made by hand, as a response to AI, as a response to CGI” — positioning the labour and imperfection of drawing as the whole point, not an obstacle to be automated away.

That commitment, he said, is about preservation: “As a response to everything, we’re trying to keep the flame alive of making things” in as artisanal a way as he can manage. He argues that audiences can feel the difference over time — that hand-drawn classics retain “a timelessness” early computer imagery lacks, even though it is “pretty easy to trick people because people are bamboozled by technology everyday.”

Moore’s opposition is expressed through practice rather than polemic: a studio-wide bet that the visibly human-made will endure precisely because it cannot be generated.