Headscratchers / Wolfwalkers

• Aside from being knocked unconscious or grievously wounded, Wolfwalkers' souls seemingly always leave their bodies as soon as they fall asleep and wake up instantly when they return. Are they actually capable of falling asleep and staying asleep? The alternative would be being forced to be fully conscious their entire lives. If people don't get enough restful sleep for a few days, which they definitely aren't running around as wolves, they die.
  • Go to sleep as a human, wake up as a wolf, go back to sleep as a wolf?
  • To add on to that, would a Wolfwalker's wolf form instantly return to their body when they touch it no matter what? Could be useful for keeping your human body warm by cuddling with yourself (and super cute).
  • When Robyn asks about her body Mebh responds "It's asleep. Nice & Cosy." This implies that the human body is in fact resting, & the reverse may be true for when they are Human in that the Wolf Body is resting. This raises the question of whether the Wolf body would need to rest after an extended time away from the Human one. Did Moll sleep at all while in the cage?

• As argued on some previously removed YMMV entries, was Cromwell even becoming a Wolfwalker in the climax? The pack's howling was powerful enough to start healing Bill's slash wound even without Healing Hands and the magic coming "from" Cromwell's breastplate was outlining Bill's teeth, which this troper believes implies they were healing/boosting them rather than infecting Cromwell. Similarly when Bill disposed of the empty breastplate, the outside is crunched but the inside appeared intact.
  • Rewatched the scene where Bill, in wolf form, drops Cromwell's armor from his mouth which falls toward the "camera". Slowing it down to frame-by-frame shows that Bill's fangs did not penetrate the armor and Cromwell was never bit so he was not transforming into a Wolfwalker. Therefore all the glowing he was seeing implies that Mebh was pushing so hard, that the healing magic was spilling out of the den proper, illuminating everything and starting to heal Bill's head wound and his fangs. This scene along with the wording of his prayer flavors Crowell's decision of Better to Die than Be Killed as him wanting to die a martyr in service of God's will rather than to whatever fate the devilish pagan Wolfwalkers had in store for him.

• Do Wolfwalkers need to eat in their wolf forms? The original legends of the Werewolves of Ossory say that any meat in the wolf body's mouth will appear in the human body's mouth through Synchronization. While it is a kids film and wolves hunting is a messy affair, Robyn certainly should have felt hungry skipping dinner twice.
  • The only situation in which I can see this being useful is if their human form was hungry. Although their human forms may not need to do so in their wolf forms, judging by how healthy Mebh still looks. Although Moll may have just been looking after her own mother while she was gone.

• What's preventing the Wolfwalkers from stopping wolf attacks entirely? They can easily call the wolves off and have an interest in minimizing damage caused by the wolves. Mebh mentions that her mother forbids the wolves from leaving the den in the daytime, yet just an hour before they were out of the den, attacking sheep. Seemingly only magic can open the vines and attacks occured even when Moll was present, so were the Wolfwalkers deliberately letting the pack out?
  • Seems like, at first Moll and Mebh were letting the pack out as a scare tactic in order to keep the townspeople from deforestation, but soon Moll realized that scaring them off won't be a solution and started to keep them in the den during daytime while she left to scout for a new place to settle. Mebh surely started to let a smaller number of wolves out in order to buy the forest a little more time while her mom returned.

• When Robyn finds Moll in the castle, she tries to push out the latch of Moll's cage with her snout and understandably fails. Why didn't Robyn pull on the latch with her mouth, like she would have intuitively done as a human? Furthermore, couldn't Moll have done the same thing? It's not like the room was guarded 24/7.
  • Robyn's failure to open the lock is easily explained as her still getting familiar with moving within a wolf body that lacks hands and an opposable thumb and the thought of using her jaws just didn't occur to her especially since she was talking/barking to Moll at the time. In rewatching the scene it does not look like Moll could have gotten her snout out of the cage at the proper angle with the right leverage to open it with her jaws.

• The elephant in the room: how the hell did Cromwell capture Moll in the first place? Did she just get surrounded and tried to pull a Bisclavret?
  • Maybe hit with a sleeping dart.
    • Possible, but not likely. The story is set in the 1650s and in a "backwater" Irish town. The odds of someone having the knowledge and materials to construct a "sleeping dart" is very slim.
  • This is unfortunately a large narrative hole in an otherwise masterful film. The "Art of the Wolfwalkers" book has a sketch in it that shows a mob cornering a large wolf at the edge of a cliff which suggests a possible way Moll was captured. The problem is that such an action violates all the rules established in the story. Namely all wolves are to be hunted and killed and there's a significant financial incentive to do so. There's no reason for a mob of villagers to risk life and limb to capture a GIANT WOLF rather than just kill it and claim the reward. The mob could have been a group of soldiers but that would suggest The Lord Protector was there to change the order from kill to capture but the film shows The Lord Protector as seeing wolf hunting as menial work, beneath him and his army. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case where Moll needed to be captured for the story to work and so she was. Don't think too hard about how she was captured alive and apparently unharmed.
• A slightly stylized Helm of Awe can be seen on a tree in the beginning of the movie. What's an Icelandic sigil doing in Ireland?
  • Vikings did invade Ireland during the Middle Ages, as shown in The Secret of Kells. Maybe it was left there by a Viking, or maybe it was just a reference to Kells.
    • I see. Probably both, as there's no real evidence of Moll being Icelandic.
• How long has Moll been captured? Surely, it cannot that be long if her human body hasn't suffered from malnutrition, right?
  • It’s possible she might been only captured for 2 or 3 days, giving that she doesn’t look malnourished and Mehb hasn’t left to look for her yet. (She probably would’ve left sooner if she'd been gone for longer.)
  • Wolves famously for care for sick & injured members of their pack, they bring them food from a kill and so on. It's possible, even likely, Mehb had seen Moll care for a dying wolf at her age & could imitate it for her comatose mother. (Furthermore, being flooded with healing energy likely helped any conditions from being stationary so long.)
• How many soldiers did twelve year-old Robyn kill in the climax, even if offscreen?
  • Well, it's a pretty solid zero given that she wasn't biting any of them and I doubt she had the time to claw any of them to death.
  • Given how we see several soldiers were limping and groaning, their will to fight broken? The pack was delibrately sparing at least some of the soldiers. As Robyn said, they're *wolves*; they can kill in a heartbeat.
    • Even if she did bite them they would become a Wolfwalker, so she probably avoided doing that.