Middle-school students at two San Francisco schools got a rare lesson in the fading art of mostly hand-drawn animation last week from Tomm Moore, the Irish artist who worked for nearly a decade to put together an animated imagining of the story behind the famous Irish illuminated manuscript of gospels, the "Book of Kells." The circa 800 A.D. book, even more painstakingly illustrated by hand by persecuted Celtic monks, is housed at Trinity College Library in Dublin.

Moore's film, The Secret of Kells, won a 2010 Oscar nomination for best animated film. It lost to Pixar's Up. The beautifully rendered film was featured at the NY/SF International Children’s Film Festival at the Embarcadero Theater last week, where Moore spoke with the audience afterward. "We wanted to show what two-D [dimension], hand-drawn animation could do" in an era marked by superslick computer-generated fare, he explained to the film-festival crowd. "2-D is more flat, like stained glass."

The story centers on the travails of a young boy named Brendan ("little prince" in Gaelic) who defies his stern uncle, the abbot of the Kells monastery. The abbot is obsessed with building a stone wall to fend off approaching Viking marauders. He forbids Brendan from wasting his time with a lone monk who insists on working on the manuscript despite the impending invasion. 

Moore said that the Vikings did, in the end, capture the "Book of Kells." The ornate gilt cover was ripped off and it was later recovered from a bog, Moore said.

Later in the week, Moore visited San Francisco Day School and Rooftop Alternative School to show middle-schoolers how the film was conceived and completed. The film's dvd goes on sale today.