Savages
Claude Barras, the acclaimed stop-motion director behind the 2016 Oscar-nominated film My Life as a Courgette, returns with his latest feature Savages: a taut and witty animation that pits the violent, unrelenting machine of capitalist greed against the rebellious native inhabitants of the Borneo rainforest.
The film opens within the depths of an Indonesian rainforest on the island of Borneo: it’s a rich and vibrant landscape awash with a cacophony of distant birdcalls, the disturbance of rustling branches and the constant on-screen movement of all manner of forest creatures. It is here we meet a young Orangutan and his mother who, due to the arrival of French workers tasked by an oppressive corporation to cut back the forest for its palm oil, find themselves swept up by the backdrop of fell trees, a large-scale factory churning pollutive fumes, and an array of trigger-happy armed militia just as the title card SAUVAGES hits the screen with apt timing.
Through cruel circumstance, the young Orungtan is taken into the care of a local worker with indigenous roots (Benoît Poelvoorde) and his teenage daughter Kéria (Babette De Coster) who christen the primate Oishi. Kéria soon strikes up a troubled relationship with her young cousin Selaï (Martin Verset), a nomadic native of the island that leads them both, with Oishi in tow, deep into the rainforest and later locked into a battle to protect their ancestral homeland.
To simply put it, it’s Local Hero meets Chicken Run. Barras manages to circumnavigate this well-worn narrative however, despite its oh-too-brief runtime that clocks in at just shy of 90 minutes, by grounding Sauvages with character-driven themes of loss, generational divides and identity; all against a backdrop of gloriously conjured animation brimming with humour, vibrant colour and hand-wrought texture that breathes life into every frame in a way that only stop-motion animation can. There’s a real heart at the core of this film and, while Savages is clearly delivering a message to its audience about the impact of rampant capitalism, it does so with plenty of family-friendly humour, levity and sincere moments of joyous humanity.
Savages is a beautifully crafted plea for the preservation of nature that begs the question: “If we saw the environmental cost of over-consumption with our own eyes, would we allow it?” The answer Barras’s film proposes is an optimistic one where, through the action of the youth, we might just manage to preserve what’s left of our natural world for future generations.
Ronan Fawsitt
Read more reviews from our London Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the London Film Festival website here.
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