Le Dormeur du Val – (Arthur Rimbaud) Animated Short Film

Le Dormeur du Val is a hybrid animated short film adapting Arthur Rimbaud’s 1870 poem of the same name. A young soldier lies in a sunlit valley, seemingly asleep amid ferns, light, and birdsong, nature cradling him as if to shelter him from the world. The film follows the poem’s quiet, deceptive calm, building through sensory, closeup imagery, sunlight through leaves, an insect at rest, the texture of worn boots, until its final reveal: the soldier is dead, two red wounds in his side. Made with a hybrid AI and traditional workflow, the film uses a non-photorealistic, painterly visual language to hold the tension between beauty and violence at the heart of the poem, letting nature’s stillness carry the weight of what it conceals.