A small, handmade film about the freedom of making things has taken one of the warmest honors at the world's biggest animation festival. Into the Forest, a Swiss stop-motion short directed by Antonin Niclass, won the Young Audience Award at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Festival, Variety reported.
A studio becomes a jungle
The short's premise is disarmingly simple: three puppet monkeys, left alone in a cold animation studio, dismantle the workspace and rebuild it, prop by prop, into a lush jungle. It is a film about imagination as a kind of survival — and about creation as its own reward. One central image, a puppet breaking free of the rig that animates it, gives the idea its clearest form. "Creation is an act of emancipation," Niclass said, per Variety.
A filmmaker on the rise
Niclass, a graduate of Britain's National Film and Television School, is no stranger to Annecy; his earlier shorts screened there in 2021 and 2022. Into the Forest was produced by Milos-Films and shot at a studio in Lausanne, and it carries a small bit of stop-motion in-jokery: one of its puppets is Oshi, the baby orangutan from director Claude Barras's 2024 feature Savages, lent through a collaboration between studios — a nod to the close-knit world of Swiss puppet animation.
Why the award matters
The Young Audience Award is one of Annecy's more distinctive honors because it is decided by young viewers rather than an industry jury — an audience with little patience for anything that does not genuinely connect. For a patient, physical craft like stop-motion, that vote of confidence is its own kind of validation. As studios pour resources into computer animation and, increasingly, into AI tools, a hand-built short about three monkeys and a make-believe jungle just reminded the festival's youngest audience why the old magic still works.
