Four minutes into Savages, a French-language arthouse film supposedly for kids, a baby watches in tears as his mother is gunned down by uniformed men in broad daylight. Before the murder unfolds, we’re in the idyllic paradise of a rainforest in Borneo. Snakes slither, frogs bask in open streams, and creatures populate the canopies. Then there are murmurs of cranes and chainsaws. The arriving killers are palm oil plantation workers with a bloodthirst for chopping down trees. Yes, the sudden orphan and his dead parent are orangutans in a stop-motion animation feature, but it’s haunting, nonetheless.

Savages, then, is a film designed to transform young viewers into eco-activists, who, as a bonus, will possess a taste for thought-provoking, subtitled cinema. A piece of beautifully rendered art on its own, the sophomore feature from Swiss director Claude Barras also has plenty to espouse about indigenous rights, climate change, and the need for direct action. The young characters aren’t passive; they arrange non-violent protests, spread the word about their cause, and risk their lives to battle a capitalistic corporation.

“I’m someone who is hopeful, and if I wasn’t hopeful, I wouldn’t have made this film,” says Barras, 52, to Dazed through an interpreter. “Because without hope, you won’t have a desire to act. I don’t want to make children cry. I want to encourage them to feel positive and to act.” The film also gives a voice to the Penan tribe, a group of nomadic indigenous people whose home is in the jungle. “The Penan community tell stories that can influence the reality around them,” says the director. “If you tell a story with a positive ending, you can send that positive influence into your reality.”

Like Flow, another acclaimed, eco-conscious, arthouse animation adventure, Savages premiered at Cannes where it hypnotised adults, not kids. Barras, who’s previously cited Lars von Trier, David Lynch, and Michael Haneke as deep influences, made his directorial debut in 2016 with My Life as a Courgette, a stop-motion feature about orphans that received an Oscar nomination a year later. He wrote Courgette with Céline Sciamma, the filmmaker behind Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A trademark of Barras’s animation is characters with oversized heads and minimal features. The style is motivated by the small budgets, he explains, and the ability to create empathy through stark facial expressions. He also describes his films as, effectively, Ken Loach for kids. “Loach focuses on marginal people. They’re people who you might think are hard to understand. He manages to let the audience under their skin, and he portrays them with a lot of dignity.”

In Savages, 11-year-old Kéria adopts the orphaned orangutan (he’s nicknamed Oshi) after witnessing its mother’s murder. The young girl’s political stance is enhanced when a squabble with her Penan cousin, Selaï, leads to the pair plus Oshi venturing into the rainforest. As an infant, Kéria was moved out of the jungle when her Penan mother was supposedly eaten by a panther; sleeping under the stars at night, Selaï teachers Kéria about Penan beliefs such as Tepun, the soul of the forest, and how to subsist through natural resources.

I don’t use AI. My issue with it is that we live in an increasingly destructive, unproductive world. Why are we creating tools that accelerate that process even more?

However, Kéria’s immersion in Penan culture is cut short when they encounter a logging company who plan to kick out the indigenous residents and replace their home with a plantation. When a Penan tribe member explains that without the forest his people are orphans, a man in a suit responds by labelling them “savages”. To foil the deforestation, Kéria uses her phone’s camera and social media apps to create worldwide media attention.

“I found out that the Penan community use drones to track the logging of their environments,” says Barras. “They leave each other messages in the forest using sticks and leaves, but they also use WhatsApp. I work on a computer to edit, and so on. I couldn’t completely shun technology in the film.” The pleasure of Barras’s stop-motion work is in the handmade detail of the clay figures and sets. There was also an eight-year gap between his two features. Would he be tempted by AI?

“I don’t use AI. My issue with it is that we live in an increasingly destructive, unproductive world. Why are we creating tools that accelerate that process even more?” He tells me that his next stop-motion film, You’re Not the One I Expected, a drama about a father whose daughter is born with down syndrome, will likely come out in 2028. “It’s scary to think of where we’ll be in 2028. Some funding bodies are now using AI to go over scripts. All I can do is keep doing the work I do.”

A sign of changing times is how Wes Anderson was unfairly accused of othering his Japanese-speaking characters in 2018’s Isle of Dogs by not applying English subtitles when they spoke. In Savages, the Penan language is never subtitled; as far as I know, Barras hasn’t faced any backlash. “In fact, Isle of Dogs helped me with funders who were keen on subtitling the Penan language in the film, which I was keen not to do,” says Barras. “Kéria discovers this language she doesn’t know, and it creates this emotional connection.”

While Barras insists that Savages “isn’t particularly militant”, he hopes that viewers, especially children, will do their own research once the credits roll. “If young audiences emotionally engage with Oshi, the animals, and the forest, then it’ll create a desire to protect that environment. It’ll compel them to act.” Originally, the screenplay was pitched to financiers as an adventure film; it was later on that some exhibitors felt the film was too radical to touch.

“The film was written and developed before Covid,” says Barras. “It was a time when there was a lot of public engagement in favour of environmental rights, and people were out on the streets protesting. I feel like after Covid there’s been a complete reversal with that fight against climate change. In a way, the film has come out at the wrong time.” Later on, when answering a different question, Barras returns to this point, clarifying, “You could argue that also makes it the right time for this film.”

Savages is in UK cinemas now (available in French with English subtitles and in an English dubbed version)