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Eight years after My Life as a Zucchini premiered in Directors’ Fortnight en route to winning two Césars (and nabbing one Oscar nomination), Swiss director Claude Barras returns to Cannes with Savages, an emotionally resonant stop-motion fable that looks at rampant deforestation on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.

A tight 87 minutes, Savages wastes no time tossing us directly into the action as pre-treen Kéria and her palm-oil-extractor father witness his employer’s murder of an orangutan. Despite this killing occurring off-screen, it is very distressing. The father-daughter duo act quickly to hide the lone survivor, a baby orangutan, in their bag. With this harrowing opening, Savages relays that the death and destruction at the center of its narrative will not be sugar-coated for children.

This very cute orangutan is named Oshi, due to the sneeze sound he makes, and is primarily an accessory for the 11-year-old Kéria––a...

Films about the ecological stakes of contemporary life often center the results of unfettered human consumption. By showing the abuses suffered by the environment, they function as both an urgent warning and a desperate plea. Claude Barras takes a different route in Savages (Sauvages), his incisive and edifying animated feature about an 11-year-old girl trying to protect her land and people from encroaching deforestation.

Premiering at Cannes, Savages focuses on elemental beauty and the dignity of community-driven preservation. It is the latest film from the Swiss director whose last film My Life as a Zucchini premiered at Cannes in 2016 and went on to critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination. As in that movie, Barras does not condescend to or patronize his youngest audience members. Savages, written by Barras and Catherine Paillé in collaboration with Morgan Navarro and Nancy Huston, is uncompromising in its messaging, deceptively spare in its instruction and absolutely gorgeous to look at.

The best part of “Savages” is its opening scene, which says less about the overall quality of Claude Barras’ sophomore feature and more about the strength of the vignette that establishes the stop-motion movie’s world. Against atmospheric music, the quote “The world does not belong to us. We borrow it from our children” flashes on screen, followed by images of a lushly rendered clay forest, brimming with life and energy. An adorable baby orangutan is briefly threatened by a small but deadly snake, before being rescued and cared for by his protective mother. Atop a tree, the mother gently breastfeeds her young son, in an idyllic image that is quickly disrupted by the sound of chainsaws, and abruptly, the tree falls to the ground, revealing a construction site filled with lumber and a factory spewing pollution into the air. The title “Savages” comes on screen against this image, and...