It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Kosky.

On last week's show, we talked about John Sale's magical realist fable, The Secret of Her Own Inish.

We initially came to that film

because we were thinking about the fairy tale tradition of animals taking human form and vice versa,

and the way folklore stories use that image to consider the connections between humans and

the natural world, both how close we are to it and how deliberately we distance ourselves from it.

And the reason we were thinking about those topics was because of Wolf Walkers,

the new film from the Irish Animation House Cartoon.

Wolf Walkers follows a young British girl named Robin Goodfellow,

with all obvious nods to Shakespeare,

as she and her widowed father come to an Irish town where he's been tasked with ridding the

local woods of wolves so the local peasantry can feel safe.

This brings Robin into conflict with Maeve, a wild child in the woods who becomes a wolf when she sleeps.

Maeve's mother, also a wolf walker, has gone to sleep and won't wake up,

which is preventing Maeve and her pack of wolves from leaving the forest to escape the hunt.

Befriending her, puts Robin in conflict with her own father, with her father's overseer,

the British Lord Protector, ruling the town and trying to bring the local wilds under

his control, and with nature itself, as she tries to fight what she's becoming, after

...