Into the Forest (2026)
Every so often a short film comes along that is so beautiful to look at that the usual criteria start to feel almost beside the point, and Into the Forest, Antonin Niclass's stop-motion short film, is one of those. I watched it at the BFI London Film Festival and came away calling it, without much exaggeration, one of the best animated shorts I have ever seen. Three and a half stars, held back from more only by how slight it is as a story.
The premise is a lovely, self-aware little thing. In a quiet stop-motion studio, a small clay monkey opens its eyes to find everything around it frozen and still. On a nearby computer screen a luminous jungle glimmers, distant and almost alive, and with two companions the monkey sets out to build a forest of their own from whatever odds and ends they can find, an escape conjured purely out of imagination. It is a film about animation made by animators, a gentle meta fable about creating a world when the one you are in has gone cold and motionless.
But honestly, the story is almost secondary to the craft, because the craft is extraordinary. The claymation is simply gorgeous, those little clay figures brimming with character and tactile warmth, every fingerprint and texture lovingly visible, and the animation itself is as expressive and fluid as anything I have seen in the form. It makes sense that Niclass has a BAFTA on his shelf for Do Not Feed the Pigeons, because there is a real master's touch here. There is even a wonderful moment, a three-way finger-point straight out of Spider-Man, that is so playful and perfectly timed it genuinely delighted me.
Told without a word of dialogue, it leans entirely on image, movement and Fabio Amurri's score to carry its feeling, and it does so with total confidence. It is the sort of thing that reminds you why painstaking, handmade animation still has a magic that nothing slicker can replicate.
If anything keeps it from the very top, it is simply that it is so short and so light on narrative that there is not quite enough there to hold onto beyond the spectacle. I would happily have spent far longer in its world, and a touch more story might have given all that beauty something firmer to land on. Three and a half stars. Into the Forest is a small, exquisite piece of animation, visually astonishing and made with obvious love, and even if it is more a gorgeous reverie than a fully-fledged tale, I would urge anyone who loves the form to seek it out.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Switzerland: Jaha's Promise (2017), Memoria (2021), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
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)
