Last Bank holiday Monday I decided to treat myself to a double bill in the IMC Dun Laoghaire. I caught the early afternoon show of Song of the Sea and a late afternoon screening of Inside Out. Yes, I am technically an adult.

For a partially locally produced and well-reviewed feature film such as Song of the Sea, I was expecting that the screening would be at least partially full, after all, the movie had gotten an Oscar nomination, there was no school and parents would probably be in the mood to pack their kids off to the cinema so that they could get a lie in.

Two people were at the screening: the person who came with me and I. Two of us. Out of the population of south county Dublin. Now, I admit, the film had been out for three weeks at that stage, but looking at Geek Ireland’s own review(We gave it a deserved 5/5), our own reviewer had attended an otherwise empty screening on the opening weekend.

What’s led us to the point where easily the finest Irish film of the last decade can’t scare up an audience? The film has earned a paltry €100,000 at the UK and Irish Box Office, with a worldwide gross of less than one million euro to date. Inside Out is currently at around ten million euro, and was released two weeks after Song of the Sea. The local media have been remiss in their promotion of the release of the film, dozens of column inches were devoted to the releases of Frank and Calvary last year. Presumably because Michael Fassbender was slumming it in a completely joyless “comedy” that was one of the dullest movies I’ve ever had to sit through. Calvary was as bad, a bleak and thoroughly miserable movie performed by actors who were going through the motions. Sadly though, they’re live action. Animation is seen as “kid’s stuff” despite the fact that it’s the one form of filmed entertainment where the Irish excel, all of the recent Irish Oscar nominations and wins come from the animation sector.

Song of the Sea is as good as the best of Studio Ghibli’s output. In terms of story, character design, animation quality and soundtrack, it beats everything in their back catalogue bar Spirited Away. So why haven’t audiences embraced it? It’s more age appropriate for younger audiences, anyone under the age of eleven watching Inside Out most likely had no idea what was going on. A fact confirmed that the children that attending the packed screening I went to lasted about ten minutes before going insane with boredom and chasing each other around the cinema.

The truth is probably that the promotion of the film has been mediocre. I hadn’t seen a single poster other than the one on the foyer of the cinema. I don’t remember seeing a single bus advertisement, trailer or tweet about the film. Meanwhile, promotional material for Minions and Inside Out is everywhere. Typically, a similar budget needs to be spent on marketing a film as was spent on producing it. Song of the Sea cost an estimated €5.3 million. Nowhere near the colour of that was spent on promotion, and it shows. It’s great that the Irish Film Board provided a chunk of funding so that this delightful film could be made, but not backing it upon release is shameful.

We’ve just had a weekend where twenty thousand people attended Dublin Comic Con, why wasn’t there a promotional push at that event? Have the director and writer give a panel, throw in a screening at the nearby cinema and have posters on every available space and thousands of people, including animation fans and families, this would have been wonderful.

This is a film that deserves as wide an audience as possible. If you get a chance while it’s still playing, go to the cinema and experience the best Irish film in quite some time for yourself.