Eternal Tales Before the Myth Out now
Animated Creative Animated Creative

Worlds within ours.
Stories told true.

Animated Creative is an independent creative studio in Ireland & New Zealand, developing original literature, animation, audio, and immersive work.

DISCOVER CONTACT

About the Studio

A home for original stories

Words, have saved me. More times than I could ever count.

L.E. Belle

That line came from one of us. It is the closest thing this studio has to a founding principle: stories, told with enough craft, seriousness, and grounding in the real, have weight. They do things in the world. Everything we build starts from there.

Animated Creative is a creator-led studio that develops, produces, and distributes original work across literary, audio, interactive, and immersive formats. Creators keep ownership of what they bring. The studio's part is to help carry it the rest of the way.

A small team works across disciplines: writing, music, animation, audio production, operations, and software, each backed by formal training and years of practice. At its heart sits a creative partnership built through music more than twenty years ago, reformed in 2025 as the basis for everything the studio makes now.

The catalogue opens with Eternal Tales®, a mythological restoration grounded in Irish archaeology, manuscript scholarship, and the landscapes where the stories were first told. The Ends of the Earth, a fantasy novel for younger readers by L.E. Belle, follows, with more to come from other creators. Some of us live across the Lough Neagh basin. The rest live in Raglan, New Zealand. Two hemispheres, one studio.

Eternal Tales® is Ireland’s mythology brought back to the ground it came from.

The stories reach back tens of thousands of years, from the people who raised the great monuments to the hunters who came long before them. The oral traditions are gone. What survives passes through medieval Christian monks, then borrowers, translators, revivalists. Eternal Tales® lives in the gap between what was lived and what was written down.

Peer-reviewed archaeology, and the landscapes that hold it. Medieval texts read with the Christian overlay named and accounted for. Creative reconstruction held tight to evidence.

Nothing borrowed from later retellings. Every weapon, garment, ceremony, landscape grounded in evidence. Every line earned through years of research. The novels are written. The scores are composed and recorded. The sound design is built shot by shot. The long way, and the only way the material deserves.

Not fantasy inspired by Irish mythology. Not a recovered original. A restoration, placed back where it was lost from, with the seams shown.

Drawn from peer-reviewed archaeology reaching back thirty thousand years across the island’s record, and from medieval manuscript texts read against the evidential record. Every claim tagged by status: established archaeological fact, inherited tradition, or original creative reconstruction.

  • Before the Myth: Tales From the Deep Past of Ireland, by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Íosa. A teller seated at a night fire with the listeners gathered round it in the dark, sparks streaming up into the rain.

    Original Artwork by James Hutton

    Out now. Published Wednesday 2 September 2026. Buy now

    On cleared ground that still fights the blade, with the warriors away north, the seer Weletos gathers those who remain around a fire and begins to speak. A mammoth calf slipping into a southern cave the night the sky burned in veils. A hunter turning back from a march south because something quieter than wind had spoken in his chest. A woman barefoot beside a loch in the west, listening to the last unbroken night before a dawn that would change everything. And more tales yet through the night, each closer to the listeners’ own bones than the last.

    Drawn from the real archaeology of this island, from the age of ice to the age of bronze, stripped of later overwriting, rendered in the mythic register the land has always carried. Before the Myth is the foundational volume of Eternal Tales and the companion key to An Oath on Stone. The chain of mouths through which Ireland remembers itself, and the breath before the myths the rest of the world thinks it knows.

  • Think You Know Ireland?

    The island, told where it happened.

    Weletos the Firekeeper at the passage tombs, cairns and caves, filmed on location.

    Subscribe on YouTube

  • An Oath on Stone cover by James Hutton.

    An Oath on Stone

    Bronze Age Ireland. The land is sick, and the kingship is rotten.

    The first novel of Of Gods and Men. Lugh, the pre-Christian god of light, restored to the Bronze Age Irish landscape his story was made on. Drawn from archaeology, manuscript, and the ground that still holds their evidence.

  • Voice of the Filí poster by Anastasia Khmelevska. Nine native Irish narrators in one landscape.

    Voice of the Filí

    Mythology in the voice of the witness.

    Nine narrators, each anchored in a native Irish species. The raven attends what only the raven sees. The squirrel notices what only the squirrel smells. Two of the nine are long extinct, their voices carried in bone and absence. For a reader of any age.

Read more at eternaltales.ie →

by L.E. Belle
The Ends of the Earth cover artwork. Molly and Toby at the threshold between a suburban street and a scorched red world.

When her grandfather's mirror reveals a dying world, twelve-year-old Molly Tempest steps through the bricked-up Devil's Door with her dog Toby and into a scorched land. There Malus spreads: a force born of rust, corrosion, and the wreckage humanity left behind. Armed with a living bow and a band of unlikely companions, Molly carries the only hope left for two worlds at once.

“Never be afraid to be you. Wonderful, strong, brave and loyal you. Jump from the fourth step. Speak your mind. Toss the coin. Confront the beast. Explore and dream. See the world even if only in your mind. Go all the way to hell if you have to, just never lose that thunder. Stand in your light and own the magic you've been given. For not everyone is lucky enough to receive it. And always, always, keep dreaming, as you were made for more.”

Pops's last letter to Molly

“The sky was a scorched red, with grey black clouds that looked like thick smoke. The ground was black and tarry, with bright red veins of fire streaking through it as far as the eye could see. There were trees in the distance, black with no leaves, just bare branches stretched towards the sky like the hopeless fingers of the dead and damned.”

glimpse of Malus's world

Original Artwork by Grimsloki

Get in Touch

From the Studio.

Release news, work in progress, the things worth sharing. Nothing else.

All other enquiries: info@animatedcreative.ie

eternaltales.ie theendsoftheearth.ie (coming)