Survival rarely came with a script. Animals didn’t get to explain their terror, narrate their grief or tweet about their anxieties; they simply adapted, or they didn’t. Aller & Retour, a stop-motion short by Lucia Bulgheroni and Michele Greco, dropped audiences straight into that wordless struggle, following two young stoats flung into the wild and forced to fend for themselves.
What began as a tender coming-of-age tale took a sharp turn with the arrival of a hunter, a jolt that reframed the film entirely, transforming it from a story about growing up into an unsettling meditation on humanity’s relationship with the natural world. By the time the credits rolled, viewers were fully invested in whether these two small, fragile creatures made it through a world that suddenly felt far less forgiving.
The film racked up festival selections at a clip, including Fest Anča 2026, the 66th Zlín Film Festival, Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2026, the 43rd Sulmona International Film Festival and Animayo, an Oscar-qualifying showcase alongside a slot at Annecy, which Bulgheroni called a joyful surprise and the pinnacle of the animation calendar.
The title itself carried the film’s DNA. Greco explained that the French phrase, meaning – coming and going, mirrored the stoats’ seasonal transformation, their fur flipping from reddish-brown to white in winter and back again come spring. It also doubled as a cheeky character sketch: Aller was the bold one who leapt into change, Retour the cautious sibling who’d rather things stayed exactly as they were.
The idea took root in Greco’s long-standing fascination with coming-of-age stories. Working with co-screenwriter Guenda Certo, he built a narrative around nature’s own version of growing up, the stoats’ seasonal shapeshifting providing a ready-made metaphor for adaptation under pressure. Choosing stoats wasn’t accidental either: small enough to be instantly relatable, yet predators in their own right, they allowed the filmmakers to explore themes of difference and integration of prey and predator finding common cause against a shared threat.
For Bulgheroni, the script struck a more urgent chord. Reading it reminded her of the real-world plight of ermines, whose seasonal camouflage was being thrown into chaos by climate change. That resonance pushed the hunter to the centre of the film, rendered deliberately in CGI, a jarring intrusion designed to clash with the handcrafted, wool-textured world around him. The visual disharmony was the point: he didn’t belong, and the film never let you forget it.
That wool-inspired aesthetic was a deliberate choice too, aiming for a tactile, playful, childhood-tinged look that bonded the animals to their habitat and made the hunter’s visual estrangement land even harder. Pulling it off was no small feat: with just two months to animate the entire film, the team leaned heavily on tight collaboration to nail performances in as few takes as possible. One sequence, Retour sprinting towards his trapped brother, perfectly synced to a tracking shot, stood out as a high-wire act of choreography, one Bulgheroni credited animator Niccolò Gioia with pulling off without a hitch.
Both directors arrived here via winding creative paths. Bulgheroni’s stop-motion obsession began during videomaking studies in Milan, deepened through an MA in directing animation at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, and produced her first short, Inanimate, in 2018, before she landed at Fantasmagorie Studio and found Greco’s script. Greco, trained in screenwriting and stop-motion in Rome, had already self-produced his debut short, Lars: The Nagging Bug, in 2020 and knew instantly that Bulgheroni’s directorial eye was what the project needed.
The takeaway they hoped would stick was an awareness of climate change’s toll on wildlife, and a reminder that when the threats got big enough, old hierarchies and rivalries stopped mattering; survival depended on banding together.
Both directors were already plotting what came next. Bulgheroni is developing a project blending live action with stop-motion, her preferred artistic medium; Greco is eyeing an adaptation of a children’s book, possibly in 3D, as either a short or a miniseries.
Two stoats, one French phrase, and a hunter rendered in unforgiving CGI, Aller & Retour proved that sometimes the smallest creatures carried the heaviest stories. It was a space to watch.
