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Silverwing Takes Flight on Teletoon

© Nicholas Moreau

"Long before the first migration, there raged a Great Battle between the Birds and the Beasts. This was fought to establish the balance of nature and the territorial limits of every species. The bats, being neither birds nor beasts, would not choose sides in the conflict. For this, a law was passed that forever condemned the bats to darkness. One young bat, Shade Silverwing, dared to break the law..."

Vanocouver's Bardel Entertainment began working on developing Kenneth Oppel's "Silverwing" young adult novels into a feature film. Along the way, they decided a feature just wouldn't do. Oppel's series about the coming-of-age of a bat named Shade, would need more room to spread its wings out in.

The popular book series then was evolved into a 13-episode half-hour serial, launched this fall on Teletoon.

Shade, the lead in the series, is the fatherless runt of the colony, and is determined to challenge the rules, to prove himself. Offended that Shade dared to look into the sun, General Brutus, Commander of the Owls demands Shade be handed over, a scarifice for his own crimes. Frieda, the Silverwing's head elder, refuses to comply with the owl's demands, causing the Owls to firebomb the bats' summer home, Tree Haven. The nursing roost, mystic Echo Chamber, and their migratory home are destroyed.

And so the premiere episode ends with shamed Shade not realizing the battle has barely even started.

The series follows Shade and fellow exile Marina, in what director Keith Ingham accurately calls "an epic story of trial, tribulation and discovery."

Kenneth Oppel and Bardel Entertaioment have truely creates a wonderfully unique and epic story for the small screen. Just the concept of bats as the heroes is enough to set this slightly gothic cartoon aside from the rest.

Author Oppel comments that "[Bats are] nocturnal, subterrainean, dangerous, strangely beautiful... and of course, a creature that was considered monsterous and freakish, and had never been written about before. It was new territory, always exciting for the writer. Bats offered a new way of seeing the world, a new set of eyes and ears to experience a story."

The content is age appropriate, and the violence and language in the episodes I've seen hasn't been indulgent or gratuitous.

The animation itself is of the quality you could expect from a feature, with strong, unique designs, interesting location design, and good animation. Oppel himself mentioned that he was excited, fascinated and flattered "to see how other talented artists render visually characters I created with words."