Following Oscar winner Flow and Oscar nominee Butterfly, the French animation studio continues a remarkable three-year awards run with Agnès Patron’s César-shortlisted animated short.
Sacrebleu Productions, the company behind Academy Award-winning feature Flow and Academy Award-nominated animated short Butterfly, continues its recent awards run with To The Woods (Une Fugue), directed by Agnès Patron. Qualified for consideration for the 2027 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the film has also been shortlisted by the César Academy for the 2027 César Award for Best Animated Short Film.
To The Woods earned its Oscar qualification through the Grand Prix Anima for Best International Short Film at the 2026 Anima festival in Brussels. The recognition follows its world premiere at the 64th Semaine de la Critique in Cannes in 2025 and its Short Cuts Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. The short has earned more than 90 official festival selections and 15 awards worldwide.
Producer of To The Woods and founder of Sacrebleu Productions Ron Dyens said, “After the extraordinary journeys of Flow and Butterfly, we are very proud to return to the Oscar race with Agnès and her deeply personal film,To The Woods. Supporting singular filmmakers and distinctive forms of animation has always been at the heart of Sacrebleu, and Agnès’s film represents exactly that.”
“It’s been deeply moving to see To The Woods connect with audiences at festivals around the world,” said To The Woods director Agnès Patron. “This is a very personal film, and I’m grateful for the care and recognition it has received. To see a story rooted in my own family resonate with people across different countries and cultures means so much to me and everyone who helped bring it to life.”
Written by Patron and Johanna Krawczyk and produced by Ron Dyens and Claire Maillard, the 15-minute animated French short follows a sister’s memories of her brother and the nighttime world they once shared. A journey through the forest, a swim in the river and small gestures of affection become fragments of a childhood she continues to carry with her.
The story draws on Patron’s family history: her grandmother lost her older brother in a car accident when she was young, and her love for him endured throughout her life. That experience informs a film about how the people we lose remain present in our memories, even as we grow older.
Rendered in warm colours and deep nighttime shadows, To The Woods moves between the tenderness of those memories and the unease of an absence that cannot be resolved. Without dialogue, the film finds its emotional language in the siblings’ movements, the sounds of the forest and water, and an original score and sound design by composer Pierre Oberkampf, who worked on the Oscar-nominated Letter to a Pig (2024) and Butterfly (2026).
The film’s tactile visual style was created through animation drawn in TVPaint and then painted by hand, frame by frame, before being composited with hand-painted backgrounds. The resulting images feel fluid and alive, reflecting the shifting nature of memory.
