A Greyhound of a Girl Review

A Greyhound of a Girl is a pan-European animated film based on a children’s novel by Roddy Doyle and follows a young girl as she lives through a great upheaval.

Mary O’Hara (Mia O’Connor) is a young girl who aspires to be a chef and is close with her fun-loving but no-nonsense grandmother, Emer (Rosaleen Linehan). When Emer is taken to hospital the family learns she is suffering from a terminal illness and Mary struggles to cope, leading her to clash with her mother, Scarlett (Sharon Horgan). Mary ends up befriending a strange lady, Anastasia (Charlene McKenna) who’s surprisingly old-fashioned despite her youthful appearance.

A Greyhound of a Girl premiered at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world and it offered something to the usual franchise fare from Pixar, Dreamworks, and Illumination. It was a low-key drama that explored serious issues about death, grief, and the mother-daughter relationship. It resembled films like A Monster Calls, When Marnie Was There, and Petite Madam.

A Greyhound of a Girl aims to tell a story about the inevitability of death and how it will strike everyone at some point. It raised serious and sometimes uncomfortable questions from my six-year-old nephew. It showed A Greyhound of a Girl could engage with the target audience.

Mary and Scarlett’s reactions were realistic. Mary became angry, frustrated, and acted out because of the changes in her life. Her grandmother was ill, and her best friend was moving to a dark, desolate place called England. It was made worse because Mary had a forthright personality and she often got into fights with her mother. Scarlett had the triple stress of having to deal with her mother’s declining health, seeing the toll it was having on her daughter but still needed to act as a disciplinant towards Mary. Scarlett held it together for her family but struggled, especially during the immediate aftermath of finding out the tragic news.

A Greyhound of a Girl was also a story about the mother-daughter relationship. The film showed four generations of women from the same family. Besides the testy relationship between Mary and Scarlett, Scarlett was telling her mother to slow down, but Emer was stubborn, which was where Mary got that trait from. Anastasia was the fourth generation of this family of women since she was Emer’s mother. This might seem like a minor spoiler, but it was telegraphed since Mary and Anastasia looked alike, Anastasia knew about Mary and her family, and Anastasia was bemused by modern technology. The film did gain a lot of emotional drama and tenderness through this four-way dynamic.

The final major theme involved traditionalism. Mary was looking to cook something modern and different to impress judges at a culinary school, but her grandmother advised the child to make something more traditional and Irish. This gave the film a Ratatouille moment. It was humorous to hear Emer and Anastasia speaking with thicker Irish accents and Emer used Irish pronunciation of words like ‘idiot.’  It was notable that Anastasia and Emer came from rural Ireland, and Mary and Scarlett were city dwellers.

A Greyhound of a Girl focused on heavy themes yet there was never a sense of despair and it managed to have moments of fun. Emer was a strong personality who didn’t let dying get her down, and when she threatened some cooking judges it was funny. It was amplified due to these characters having cartoony designs. My nephew enjoyed the supermarket scene which offered a light relief. The film’s music offered sorrow and melancholia from traditional-sounding Irish songs, but there was also a jaunty pop number during one scene. When there were dreams and flashback sequences they looked like drawings from a sketchbook and some moments were similar to another Irish animated film, Wolfwalkers.

A Greyhound of a Girl shows that animated media for children can tackle serious issues and subjects while still being engaging and entertaining. Western animation needs to make more films like this to go with the big-budget Hollywood fare.