Biografía

7 de enero de 1977 · Newry, Northern Ireland, Reino Unido

His film often have folklore involved.

The main protagonists in his films are kids who have a young friend or sibling with magic abilities.

We have a huge responsibility when we make movies aimed at kids to say something they need to know, instead of just distracting them with fart jokes and talking animals.

Comptuter-generated animation was becoming more and more an attempt to mimic live action, like they just wanted it to look as real as possible. We found that a little bit boring. It was some kind of obvious dead end. We thought there was much more to explore with hand-drawn animation.

We think there's something a little bit more timeless about hand-drawn animation. There was plenty of things that weren't being done yet, because people either thought of hand-drawn animation as Disney or Saturday morning cartoons, you know? There's a whole space in between, especially in the short film world, where lots of expressive and interesting things were being done.

2D is closer to the language of dreams. It's closer to the language of symbols. You can see cave paintings from 30,000 years ago, and they are magical because they're stylized and represent a way of communicating that's evolved over the whole history of painting; drawing comics, illustration, these are things that only work as drawings that you can use in hand-drawn animation.