Celles et Ceux des Cimes et Cieux (“Girls and Guys from Summits and Skies”) is a remarkable short animation (two and a half minutes) that is the senior project of Gwenn Germain, a student at the French art school Créapole.

The film is an overt homage to the work of the brilliant Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and not only emulates the beautiful style of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli animations, but makes reference to specific elements from several of them.

The story is about a youth living in a giant tree, who falls into the lower levels of the forest and is helped in returning home. It’s really more of a simplified arc on which Germain has given himself license to parade a fantastic series of vividly imagined and beautifully rendered sequences and environments.

Even though I’m very fond of Miyazaki’s films, I don’t think I get all of the references here, or even all of the implications of the story — but when it looks like this, I’m content to be dazzled. The short is getting a lot of attention from Miyazaki fans and others around the net, and we can hope to see some wonderful work from Germain in the future.

You can see another, earlier short by Germain, Bococo, about two parrots in a burning apartment, and see some of his preliminary sketches, layouts and other work on his deviantART gallery.

[Via Digg]