"I was in college in 1999. Mulan had come out the year before and we discovered a film called The Thief And The Cobbler that was never finished by a London animator called Richard Williams, who'd done the animation for Roger Rabbit. A group of us said, 'Why don't we try and do something like that? What they did in Mulan with Chinese art, and The Thief and the Cobbler with Persian art, we could try and do it with Irish art.'

"What could we do that is not Disney, not American or Japanese but influenced by both, but is uniquely Irish? Then I started looking at [famous medieval illuminated Bible] the Book of Kells, which is sort of the high point of Irish visual art. There's so many stories and legends and myths around that really interesting time, whenever all the pagan stuff was clashing with the saints and they were kind of taking over, and we started developing the story."