“Did Machin consider himself an author of fables in his animalist films? It is difficult to determine ‘why’ or ‘for who’ Machin made these curious films, in which domestic animals often mingle with wild ones in his enclosure and occasionally with humans, even if most of these are ‘interpreted’ solely by animals inserted into a fiction context. They are bizarre, rather than fascinating films; even a little perverse, like L’Enigme du Mont Angel in which we can see a sort of ‘romance’ between a human (in this case: a baby) and a monkey which reminds us of … King Kong [sic]. Or also in Robinson Junior, in which two boys, one black, the other white, have comic misadventures with jungle animals.

On the other hand, his latter film very much resembles an animated cartoon in its simple humour and naive candour.

A possible motivation: Machin may have been searching for a form to preserve the almost organic ingenuity of the cinema during the second period of silent movies -ingenuity and simplicity which no longer seem possible or are no longer agreed to and accepted- in the 1920s. If not in a genre which he himself more or less invented: the film in which only animals and children participate”. (Eric de Kuyper)