Nora Twomey

Nora Twomey (born 31 October 1971) is an Irish animator, director, screenwriter, producer and voice actress.

She is best known as the co-founder of Cartoon Saloon, alongside Tomm Moore and Paul Young, an animation studio and production company, based in Kilkenny City, Ireland.

She is best known for co-directing The Secret of Kells and directing The Breadwinner.

Her work on both films earned Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature.

Twomey was educated at St. Mary's Secondary School in Midleton, County Cork but left before completing the Leaving Certificate at the age of 15.

She did manual labor at a local factory but continued to draw and briefly studied fine art before she was admitted to Ballyfermot College in Dublin to their School of Animation program on the basis of her portfolio.

In the factory Twomey manned a conveyor belt for up to twelve hours on end during the night shift.

Twomey credits this period of her life to much of her success, as she wore headphones to drown out the loud noise of machinery, the silence combined with the monotony of the task she performed allowed her to ponder concepts and generate ideas, many of which would be put to film later in her life.

The Secret of Kells has been nominated in the category of Best Animated Feature Film at the 82nd Academy Awards.

She graduated from Ballyfermot College in 1995.

After graduating from Ballyfermot College, Twomey began to work for Brown Bags Film animation studio in Dublin.

In 1999 she helped found Cartoon Saloon, along with Tomm Moore, Paul Young and Ross Murray.

In 2002 she directed the award-winning short animated film From Darkness.

The short film has no dialogue and is based on an Inuit folk tale where a man helps a woman with only a skeleton for a body to regenerate.

She also worked on the successful animated TV series Skunk Fu!.

Twomey went on to write and direct the animated short Cúilín Dualach (Backwards Boy), released in 2004.

Based on a story by Jackie Mac Donacha, a boy with his head on backwards finds only love and acceptance in his mother and has to work to gain that from the rest of his community but most of all his father.

She co-directed, with Tomm Moore, The Secret of Kells, an animated feature film as well as doing additional voice acting for the film.

The film is set in 9th century Ireland, at the time when the Book of Kells was written.

In it, a 12 year old orphan boy living at a monastery has the task of finishing a book with the art of illumination.

The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2009.

Twomey continued to work on feature films with Cartoon Saloon with 2014's Song of the Sea directed by Tomm Moore.

She worked as the film's head of story and voice director.

She next directed the animated film The Breadwinner, released in 2017.

Based on the best-selling young adult novel by Deborah Ellis, an 11-year-old girl named Parvana must dress as a boy and become the titular breadwinner for her family when her father is wrongfully arrested by the Taliban.

It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017 with a wide release in November 2017.

It is the first feature-length film she has sole director credit on.

She worked on the project with actress Angelina Jolie, who helped fund the project and worked as an executive producer The project was a huge success for Twomey, as she was recognized as a solo female filmmaker, and given accolades as well as being lauded by many as a source of female empowerment, all while battling cancer during production.

During the development of The Breadwinner, Twomey was named in Variety's "2017 10 Animators to Watch".

Twomey is a member of the Motion Picture Academy.

Twomey's films are often coming-of-age films with pre-teen protagonists dealing with mythic worlds, the importance of stories and finishing them, acceptance, family, and communities.Twomey's work also takes aim at the fact that life is a cycle of impermanence, and that life is always ever changing.

Her depictions of this cycle vary in size and scope, an example of this being her depiction of Afghanistan in the breadwinner, which she describes as a land that has gone from progressive to oppressive in a matter of years, such is the cycle.

Twomey follows a unique design perspective either using characters that are explained by their visual design, or characters whom character gives more to the overall design or her worlds.

She tends to use simple yet effective character designs in order to be concise about delivery.

Her films combine traditional and digital art but are often hand-drawn and in a visual style inspired by the worlds of her stories.

Twomey's work is tailored to be enjoyed by all audiences, even though her protagonist are typically children or young adults, the stories they star in are typically considered complex and multi-layered, lending them to potentially be enjoyable and meaningful for adults as well as young adults and children.she has stated that animation is an often overlooked medium particularly by adults, and something she believes to be pointless, as to her it is simply another way of telling stories that can be just as complex.

Twomey particularly loves young adults as an audience, as she is able to provide them with vivid coming of age stories that attempt to depict and age where they are also coming to terms with reality, and she, unlike many filmmakers attempts to treat them with dignity by not softening the reality of her stories.

Examples of this are seen in the Breadwinner which depicts the oppression, brutality, and hypocrisy of the Taliban in a post 9-11 world.

Twomey does concede in an interview that she believes that her young adult and child portion of her audience may not have the same visceral reaction towards depictions of the Taliban as adults who have strong associations with them, however Twomey uses the " coming of age " trope with a child protagonist seeing many of these things for the first time, giving hem someone in the story that can cue how they should and would react to such situations.

She believes that a young protagonist gives children a stepping stone into more adult themes, allowing for multi layered filmmaking.