In 2017 Swiss French claymation director Claude Barras deservedly received an Oscar nomination for his first feature My Life As A Courgette, which followed a young boy from his broken home where he lived with his alcoholic single parent mother to a children’s home where one of the residents neatly describes the qualification needed to live there. “There is no one left to love us.”
What might sound like a mawkish tale of Victorian melodrama was in fact a witty and uplifting movie that revealed how a child can grow even when his or her past is rooted in trauma.
It might be slight stretch to compare a childhood to the forest of Borneo, which in Barras’s latest film is being uprooted by loggers.
But out of this context Barras tells an affecting tale of Keria, the child of plantation worker whose employers have destroyed the home of an orangutan. After the mother orangutan is killed by armed guards, her baby finds refuge in the home of Keria and her father, who is torn between supporting protests against the destruction and keeping his job.
The style differed from the smooth school of Nick Parks’s Aardman animations. With Barras’s films, the clay is alive. The fur of the baby ape ripples with life, and humans are wrought out of the material in a way that recalls childhood memories of how plasticine felt in the hand.
But though the environmental issues that motivated Barras to make the film are undoubtedly urgent, the potency of this film is diminished by wearing its campaigning, somewhat preachy heart, on its sleeve.
