Bats & Bugs (2026)
There is nothing at all wrong with Bats & Bugs, Lena von Döhren's animated short film, and I think that is rather the problem. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and found it a perfectly pleasant, nicely drawn little thing that simply never gave me a great deal to hold onto. Two and a half stars for a short that is good at what it does without doing anything that lingered.
The setup is simple by design. On a country road in the jungle at night, a lantern flickers to life, and the group of insects it attracts goes into a dizzy, light-drunk frenzy, which turns out to be very convenient indeed for the hungry bats in a nearby cave. It is a tiny food-chain fable, told entirely without dialogue, and it unfolds more or less exactly as you would expect it to.
What I did genuinely like is the look of it. The art style is lovely, all soft shapes and that striking palette of glowing greens against deep night-time blacks, and the animation is expressive and characterful in a way that gives the creatures real charm. More than anything it gave me a warm pang of nostalgia, because it felt exactly like one of those gentle animated shorts you used to catch on a Saturday morning children's variety show, the sort of thing nobody really makes any more. There is a craft and a sweetness to it that I responded to.
The trouble, for me, is that the wordless simplicity that makes it so charming also made it quite hard to stay engaged with across even its short running time. With no dialogue and a story this slight, my attention drifted, and what narrative there is, while perfectly fine as far as I could follow it, never built into anything that demanded I lean in. It is aimed squarely at very young children, and in fairness to it, that audience will likely get more from it than I did.
Two and a half stars. Bats & Bugs is a handsomely made, good-looking and genuinely charming little short with a lovely retro sensibility, and I can absolutely see it delighting a room full of kids. As a grown-up watching it cold at a festival, though, I came away thinking it was simply a really average animated short, pleasant while it lasted and gone from my mind not long after.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Switzerland: Jaha's Promise (2017), Memoria (2021), Into the Forest (2026)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: Jabberwocky (1971), Dance of the Spirits (2026), Please (2026)
