Bella and Vipulan are 16 years old. Convinced that their future is threatened, they embark on a quest to understand our relationship to the living world. Throughout an extraordinary journey, they will understand that we are deeply linked to all other species. And that by saving them, we will also save ourselves.
Posted at 9:30 a.m.
The film opens with the song of the Kauai moho, a species of bird last seen in the Hawaiian archipelago in 1987. Six years later tomorrowa feature documentary in which Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent put forward solutions to the climate crisis, the director is interested this time in another threat, that of the disappearance of species.
Less publicized, but just as worrying as global warming, this biodiversity crisis, which several scientists qualify as the sixth mass extinction, is a heavy subject in itself, a bit dry, but which becomes accessible and general public with the approach poetic and human of Cyril Dion. Without excessive use of shocking images and statistics, the director manages to deliver a powerful film that inevitably makes us reflect on the place we occupy on this planet.
At the heart of the screenplay, which Cyril Dion co-wrote with journalist Walter Bouvais, there are Bella Lack and Vipulan Puvaneswaran, two 16-year-old environmental activists, one British, the other French of Sri Lankan origin. Impressive representatives of a generation anxious about its future, they embody both the candor of a youth who has a lot to learn and the maturity of those who already know a lot.
At the invitation of Cyril Dion, they embark on a journey (by plane) in the world in order to understand our relationship to the living world. A paradox, it must be emphasized, which is addressed, but quickly brushed aside by the director.
The quest of the two young people leads them in particular to a biologist from Stanford University in California, ethnologist specializing in chimpanzees Jane Goodall, to the European Parliament where they meet an activist who works against overfishing, on a beach in Bombay cleaned by an army of volunteers, in the African savannah and in Costa Rica with its president. A rather linear form that eventually gets boring, but the diversity of encounters keeps us hooked.
You have to see the convictions of the vegan duo collide with those of an industrial rabbit breeder from the French region of Nantes. This is one of the good moves of the film: giving voice to people like him, stuck in a system that is beyond them, without falling into the trap of morality.
Because the message of the film is that it is this whole system centered on infinite growth that needs to be reviewed and that it is by saving the other species that the human race will be saved.
Indoors
Animal is showing in the original French version, with English subtitles.
Documentary
Animal
Cyril Dion
With Bella Lack and Vipulan Puvaneswaran
1:45