"The Secret of Kells" was the wild card in the recent Oscar animation race -- the little Irish movie no one had heard of, let alone seen. It's a visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.

The hero of "Kells" is Brendan (voiced by Evan Maguire), a young boy who has been apprenticed to his forbidding uncle, the Abbott of Kells (Brendan Gleeson), and ordered never to leave the monastery. There are enough dangers out there -- wolves, eldritch Celtic gods, rampaging Vikings -- that the Abbott is obsessively building high walls to protect the monks and the manuscripts upon which they labor.

There's a real Book of Kells -- a ninth-century version of the New Testament that's considered Ireland's national treasure -- but it probably wasn't created this way. The monks here are a consciously international lot and drawn by Tomm Moore with geometric glee: a big, domelike African, a toadstool-size Asian, a spherical Italian.

The appearance of Brother Aidan (Mick Lally), a puckish renegade, kicks the plot into gear. He encourages Brendan's artistic side and sends the boy out to the forest to gather materials for ink. There the movie lifts off into a Celtic eco-pantheism not far in feel from the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Brendan befriends a forest wild girl with mysterious connections to the animals, plants and Druidic forces.

On the plot level, then, "The Secret of Kells" is a kiddie adventure with twists and turns recognizable to fans of anime and the more adventurous U.S. animation. On the visual level, the film is on a higher plane entirely. Moore roots "Kells" in the limited perspectives of medieval art -- often to delightful effect -- but the film keeps bursting into patterns and motifs that dazzle the eye.