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Into The Forest
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The French stop-motion animated short film Into The Forest follows three orangutans who turn a studio into a world of play. Directed by French animator Antonin Niclass, it sees familiar objects transformed with humour and the wide-eyed wonder of its characters.
Into The Forest is Niclass’ first professional film following his graduation from the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Belgium. He previously directed the short film Do Not Feed The Pigeons.
Speaking with Eye For Film at the London Film Festival, Niclass discussed how the film fell into his lap, wanting to appeal to adults as well as children, and trying to fix our broken world.
Casper Borges: What was the starting point for Into the Forest?
Antonin Niclass: I think it’s the first time I’ve been asked to make a film. Usually, you struggle to make films, but here, the starting point was a production company who have made short cinema lessons for kids, wanted to make a stop-motion animation. They had asked the Swiss director Claude Barras, who made My Life As A Zucchini and more recently, Savages. He didn’t have time to make it and so I was left to make a stop-motion animation with his puppets. And for me it was important that it was not just a behind the scenes thing, but was more like a story that both children and adults could relate to.
CB: So, it was all unexpected?
AN: Yes, it really was. And it takes so long to make a film that in the end it becomes yours as well. We started work on this film four years ago. That was for the funding and everything else. The shoot was three months for just ten minutes.
CB: What drew you to animation in the first place?
AN: I liked the possibility of making a film on my own, and I only discovered much later that you gain so much more from collaborating. But as a story, I could just make the film in my room with Lego. That was the starting point, and I also really enjoyed the fact that in animation you have time to nurture the story, because you are writing it at each stage. I also like the fact that it’s almost fine art mixed with cinema, where even the most stupid things in the film, like a coffee cup, could already have an animated style.
CB: What were some of the challenges your faced as you began to realise the project?
AN: There will be constraints. We had the puppets and the film was going to be stop-motion. So, from there we started to make a little story with these puppets that would highlight all the different departments on a film, from light to camera, puppets to set design. And it was fun to imagine how they would move in this studio when encountering all these different departments. We really liked the idea of having the family and the community using imagination to escape, and to create their own home and family.
CB: You tease a darkness but never lean into it.
AN: The dismembered monkeys. I recently spoke with the festival selector who said, “There’s animation for children, which can sometimes be overly naive. And there’s the other side to that, which is a niche adult audience for animation shorts.” They were saying it’s so hard to find uplifting films for adults. Well, this one is for children, but I just like the idea of having something that makes you feel happy and is not about trauma. Instead, it’s more about healing in a way.
It was important not to only make it for kids. So, maybe the optimistic side that you mentioned, is also because we knew it was our primary target. The characters in our film live in a cold world of the studio. We also live in a cold world, and we’re trying to make our own better version of it.
CB: It’s amazing how much characterisation you get out of these objects, as well as humanity.
AN: They’re made of silicone, foam, and latex, and there is a metal inside. But yes, it’s amazing how much energy we can project onto an animated thing. I only realised that much later. I had some of the best animators in the world for my film. They usually work on feature films. For example, Elie Chapuis is a Swiss animator who has worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle Of Dogs.
This morning I saw the animated short films, and sometimes it’s just about the eyebrows — you can get so much emotion. There was a film where they were just these two dots. And as human beings we want to feel and empathise with things. So, even a rock can work.
CB: The simplicity of the monkey’s desire to be happy and belong drives the film.
AN: Yes, and it’s something that’s present in my previous film, Do Not Feed The Pigeons. It’s about people experiencing a moment of harmony, which I maybe don’t believe happens much, and so, I try to make it happen.
Into The Jungle played at the 2026 London Film Festival and will also play at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
