Puppet Masters: Two great stop-motion films at French Film Festival UK

New stop-motion films from directors Alain Ughetto and Claude Barras, which screen at French Film Festival UK, tell intensely personal stories and harness the revolutionary potential of this old-school animation technique

Feature by Louis Cammell | 29 Oct 2024
  • Savages

“I’ve presided over [claymation]’s imminent demise several times in my career,” says Aardman’s Tristan Oliver on a recent episode of Team Deakins, the podcast dedicated to the art of cinematography. Ever since the onset of CGI, the last days of this painstaking animation technique – usually achieved with nine-inch plasticine figurines in a scaled-down world, photographed at 24 frames per second – have been prophesied many times over. But for this stop-motion cinematographer, its longevity is unsurprising. “If you’re going to make a stop-motion movie,” Oliver told Team Deakins, “you assume that the reason you’re doing it is because you want something that is made, in the hand, in front of the camera. [Something] that has a real sense of being there.” His words set the scene for the arrival of two films to this year’s French Film Festival UK, which begins this month across Scotland and the wider UK.

Those two films – Alain Ughetto’s No Dogs or Italians Allowed and Claude Barras’ Savages – both draw on their filmmakers’ shared family histories of semi-nomadic Alpine living during the early days of the 20th century. Ughetto reincarnates his grandparents for a harsh portrait of the realities of migrant work as an Italian coal worker in Italy, France and Switzerland throughout the early part of the 20th century. Over 70 brutal minutes, it takes us from abject poverty to war, the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic, Mussolini’s fascists, and then war again. Barras takes a less autobiographical approach, transposing the themes of self-sufficiency, land erasure and displacement amid industrialisation to modern-day Borneo.

Both animators describe stop-motion as an act of resistance. If that sounds highfalutin for a children’s medium, consider that beyond the anglophone industries of the US and UK where indie rarities like Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa and dark anthology film The House are largely drowned out by family fare, animation has never been considered something just for kids. In Central and Eastern Europe, animation as a form of resistance dates back to the days of the late Eastern Bloc, when politically-minded surrealist artists evaded Soviet censors via a medium that was underestimated. France, Belgium and Italy have long held their graphic novels, from which they make films, in high esteem. Walk into bookshops in these countries and in most you’ll find that graphic novels are given equal amounts of shelf space as classic works of poetry or prose and marketed to all ages. In 2007, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis was France’s entry in the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, selected above live-action films for its deeply personal account of coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution.

It’s in this climate that both Ughetto and Barras have been making animated films for decades. For their latest, eschewing the allure of a digital workflow was an important, radical act. “Modernity prevails over all forms of resistance,” says Barras, “[because] everything appears easier with computers… it is difficult to resist.” But on Savages, it was essential to do so as much as possible, given the message of the film and his personal connection to it. In it, young Keira lives with her dad on the edges of a palm oil plantation, which is slowly encroaching on and eradicating the wildlife that surrounds it, threatening the survival of its indigenous Penan people. Chasing profit, the logging company that is eradicating the Penans' way of life claims to do so in the name of progress, offering jobs that will free them from their ‘savage’ lifestyles. When Barras met the Penan people, their story reminded him of his grandparents, who organised their lives according to nature. While there are myriad reasons why the comparison is a stretch (for one, it sidesteps the racial dehumanisation faced by indigenous populations, the imperial genocide that makes up their past and present), there do exist similarities.

“After my grandparents, my parents embraced the modern world,” says Barras. “They settled in a village, and managed the vineyards using modern methods and chemicals… But due to the use of chemical pesticides, the wildlife disappeared, leaving a kind of desert… For a nature lover such as myself, it was a huge source of conflict with my parents who, although they were sensitive to the wildlife, did not see what the problem was: modernity equalled progress to them, because it simplified the way they worked, freeing them from manual labour.”

In a hyperglobalised economy, we are all increasingly guilty of adopting this worldview, blind to the impacts of our convenience lifestyles. The computer on which this article is being written relies on data centres responsible for 1% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. With demand for them projected to rise by 160% by 2030 in the age of AI, it is no great leap to draw parallels between them and the pesticides that spayed Barras's grandparents’ land. 

These truths are especially difficult to face when we have to parse our own complicity like this. We must acknowledge, for example, that palm oil is the number one product driving Borneo’s deforestation and given that it is an ingredient of an estimated 50% of all products in the average UK supermarket, most of us are helping contribute to its destruction.

Here lies stop-motion’s power above straightforward live-action cinema, according to Ughetto. While animation needn’t be confined to a kids’ medium, something about its magic does nonetheless reach our inner child; a part of ourselves which, if we can just access it, can empower us to look directly at things that might otherwise be too hard to bear. “The [stop-motion] puppet presents us with our own imperceptible counterpart,” suggests Ughetto. “The technique allows us to transcend words, to address the unspeakable.”

Its other great strength is that it allows us to break the rules of our world, to do things like re-animate the dead or relive the past. In 2013, just six years after Satrapi’s film, Ughetto released his own story set against 1970s Iran’s revolutionary setting. Jasmine recounts his ill-fated love affair with its titular character. Seeing her again, feeling her presence in his plasticine model, gave him closure. Who knows whether he could have achieved something similar with computer animation, but stop-motion allowed him to feel like he was convening with her in real, recognisable time and space.

As if inspired by that experience, Ughetto built the sets for No Dogs or Italians Allowed out of the ruins of his ancestral land, a place called Ughettera. Translating quite literally to ‘land of the Ughettos’, the hamlet in Turin was once inhabited by those who bore his last name. Today, he says, “the roofs [have] caved in atop their peasant past, the trees [have] grown over their old lives,” driven out as they were by Mussolini’s fascists. On trips to Italy, Ughetto salvaged what he could of their everyday lives: broccoli, chestnuts, charcoal. “Head set designer Jean-Marc Ogier and I created the decor out of these elements,” Ughetto explains, “one where my grandparents could now tell me their story.” 

It is a generous act of land reclamation. Within Ughetto’s miniature world, the little that remains of the real Ughettera covers the scaled-down landscape. At twelve times their real size, stems of broccoli become trees in a land still far from prosperous, but at least still populated by Ughettos, even if they are made out of clay. Inside it, their 78-year-old maker can speak to them once more. He inserts himself into the film, his hand presiding over it like the hand of God. Yet far from breaking our immersion, the technique only emphasises that the distinction between theirs and ours is moot. They really existed. His fingerprints are the marks of their flesh-and-blood legacy; his existence, proof of their perseverance.

Perhaps it is no bad thing if these films are given the ‘family film’ label. Kids are, after all, the inheritors of our world. If these films, with their inviting soft textures and colours, can act as Trojan horses that introduce them to difficult but essential subject matter at a formative age, we might still have a chance. Both Ughetto and Barras describe being driven to make these films by the tales they heard in their youth, when they were still as malleable as their clay figurines, before their guards went up about the part they play – we all play – in turning a blind eye. On certain days, fascism, climate disaster and land theft seem too terrifying to confront. Experiencing them head-on in No Dogs or Italians Allowed and Savages are characters who share a striking resemblance to one another: “our own imperceptible counterparts” all have giant, wide-set eyes that call to us, telling us to open our own.


French Film Festival UK takes place 6 Nov to 12 Dec
For screening dates and times, head to frenchfilmfestival.org.uk