Savages: eco stop-motion captures the vitality of the Borneo forest

It’s a leap from a Swiss orphanage to the endangered rainforest of Borneo, but Claude Barras’s follow-up to his justly celebrated 2016 debut My Life as a Courgette shares with that film a commitment to placing its big-eyed, brightly painted clay-model innocents in dark corners of the real world. Unlike Courgette’s bare-cupboard world of underclass cast-offs, though, Savages sites its young protagonist on the cusp of bounteous natural mysteries and the ravenous encroachment that masquerades as ‘development’.

Eleven-year-old Kéria lives with her French father on a plantation on the edge of the forest where he is employed by the Green Forest logging company and she is keen to blend in with the other schoolgirls; when her father gives shelter to a gruff, tribally dressed Penan elder, Along Sega, it’s a shock to learn he is her grandfather and his accomplice, Selaï, her younger cousin and now charge. She’s more attached to a newly orphaned baby orangutan, but when both juveniles bolt back to the jungle at the first chance, Kéria is forced to follow them into its folds, and lose herself to find herself – in the truth about her late mother and her uphill fight.

The French title, Sauvages (meaning also ‘wild’), carries more ambiguity, but there’s no doubt who the film is indicting: the title slams down straight after the prologue’s pan from the forest to the clearance operation. It’s not often a film to lose yourself in – older viewers may know many of the story beats and motifs, from the shooting of the orangutan’s mother (a ringer for a scene in 2023’s Kensuke’s Kingdom) to Moana’s earth-mother rock face, admittedly without the Sturm und Drang of Disney’s 2016 film. 

There is a ghostly panther spirit (a note of Tropical Malady, 2004?), but rather than romanticism or mysticism, the film strives for clarity: the Penan are real people, not alien to all modernity (Along Sega has ‘Eye of the Tiger’ as his mobile ringtone) or artificially valorised (Selaï’s wayfinding and forest craft are… fledgling), but with cultural dignity and rights that the majority world tramples on.

That the film leaves their native speech unsubtitled is an expression of Kéria’s and our ignorance as well as the separateness only the Penan appreciate (Along Sega can speak French but refuses). And it takes a gun-toting company frontman to articulate that he is merely an agent of the market and our invasive appetites. As for expressing the vitality of the forest: the painted clay models and sets are warm and winning, but it’s the fecund soundtrack that most richly captures mother earth’s endowment, spinning a marvellous web of jungle detail.

► Savages is in UK cinemas 1 August.