The villain is not a fire-breathing dragon, but (voiced by Fionnula Flanagan). Macha is a tragic antagonist who, after suffering her own sorrow, decided that emotions are the enemy. She steals "troublesome" feelings and seals them in jars. She turns upset fairies to stone. She is, metaphorically, a mother who learned to suppress her pain and now forces that suppression onto the world.
Song of the Sea is not a film about Irish folklore. It is a film about how modern, rational, urban life has taught us to bottle our emotions (literally, in Macha’s jars and the grandmother’s jam). It insists that the messy, watery, unpredictable world of feeling is the only real world. song of the sea 2014