When the picture's young protagonist sings an ancient Maori song to a dark ocean, there is an indescribable power to the film that springs from firelight — what we've lost in modernity as orphans to our collective past.
Instead of a sentimental and funny story about singing and dancing jungle animals befriending an abandoned boy in the middle of the jungle, Claerbout's film removes the young human protagonist and dispenses with the anthropomorphism of the animals.