A team of animation graduates from Brassart Grenoble in the French Alps has put together one of the more eye-catching student shorts of the year: Jungle Race, a fast, violent, darkly funny film set in a near future where humans have vanished and apes have inherited the earth — and our cars.
The premise reads like a mash-up the creators would probably happily own. Take the evolved-simian world of Planet of the Apes, add the competitive chaos of Wacky Races, and imagine the whole thing filtered through a Tarantino sensibility. The result is a jungle-set racing free-for-all in which chimps and other primates battle over the one prize humanity left behind that still matters: working vehicles. There are cars, motorbikes, and a knowing nod to film buffs — one chimp pilots a Volkswagen bearing the number 53, an unmistakable wink at Herbie. Nature-reclaimed city backdrops give the whole thing a vivid, overgrown post-apocalyptic look.
Fair warning for anyone hunting it down: this is deliberately gory. The violence is the point, both as shock value and as satire — the film takes aim at a spectacle-hungry culture that turns brutality into entertainment. It is held together by rapid-fire editing, bold, colourful art direction, and a string of properly staged action sequences.
The credits read like a full class roster. Nathan Stefen, Thomas Marsaudon, Tristan Forcheron, Justine Perrin, Loïc Noailhat, Charles Lardenois, Cyprien Cotton, Ezvin Manhes, Quentin Steinhilber and Camille Tessier made up the ten-strong creative team, with music by Rémi Dutriez and Axel Leclère (aka Dogma) and sound design from Coline ColombeT, Dan Ravot and Benjamin Macé.
Why does this matter on a travel site? Because films like this are made in real places worth knowing. Grenoble, framed by the Alps at the meeting of the Drac and Isère rivers, has built a reputation as a hub for design and digital creativity, and the Brassart school there is one node in a French network that feeds animators into studios across Europe. For travellers who like their city breaks with a creative edge, Grenoble pairs mountain air with museums, street art and a young student population — and it is a convenient base for the chartreuse-range trails nearby. Watching where the next generation of animation talent is trained is as good a reason as any to put it on the list.
The short itself is worth tracking down if you have the stomach for it: inventive, loud and sharply edited, with more ideas per minute than plenty of studio releases. Just maybe not right before bed. Full write-up courtesy of Kuriositas.