`I suppose our motivation for doing this was exactly the same revulsion and helplessness that people felt when they heard the news last Sunday morning," says Art O Briain, director of The Ship of Fools, an animated exploration of sectarian division in Northern Ireland, created and written by O Briain with broadcaster and writer John Kelly (who also provides most of the narration).
"I was working with John during the first IRA ceasefire on a five-part series for Channel 4 called Off the Wall, a mixture of documentary, drama and studio debate," says O Briain. "The whole basis of the series was the ceasefire, and the idea that people could start talking to each other, so when Canary Wharf happened, it was completely undermined. But we started talking about the failure of film drama to depict the conflict in any valuable way. There were all these Romeo and Juliet stories and the liberal, wishy-washy `why can't we all live together' stuff. We began thinking about how an animation could approach the subject in a completely different way." With finance from the Cultural Traditions Group, the Film Board and the Northern Ireland Arts Council, they began work on an allegorical fable which would express the "dance of madness and hatred" across the sectarian divide.
In the half-hour film, the captain of The Ship of Fools, Baldy, lies sleeping in his hammock, dreaming of his last voyage, when he "saved" the survivors of the latest disaster, still clinging to their absolute beliefs and cultural differences. Meanwhile, in the ship's furnace, a demonic figure, Lucki, preys on the sectarian fears and hatreds of the survivors, provoking them into a spiral of uncontrollable violence. This is all rendered as a swirling, multicoloured kaleidoscope, in which imagery of marchers, gunmen, flags, the killers and the killed swoop in and out of view. It's a powerful, unsettling work which resists easy definition, although there are echoes of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and of Heart of Darkness. "We wanted to explore the subject through a really rich mix of imagery and sound," says O Briain. "We wanted to stun the viewers out of their apathy." He agrees that on one level the film is a shout of rage against sectarianism. "Yes, it is about outrage, and about saying stop. It's saying that this is bloody stuff, lethal damaging stuff."
Describing the film as "one of the most difficult productions I've been involved in", O Briain sees The Ship of Fools as a breakthrough in Irish animation. "Up to now, the tradition in Ireland has been about exploring an internal world. To me, what we've dared to do is part of a coming of age of animation here." Showing the film to an audience at the Galway Film Fleadh last week was remarkable, he says. "People who've seen it have had a kind of shell-shocked response, asking `What was that film?"'
He is anxious that the film should not be seen as a dark polemic, or as avant-garde. "The audience we're trying to reach is the people who don't care what's happening in the North of Ireland. We're hoping that people will be intrigued and ambushed by the dramatic techniques we use."
The Ship of Fools will be screened on Network 2 tomorrow at 9 p.m.