Hungary’s bid for Best International Feature Oscar is a lovely and poignant animated environmental parable built on Native American mythology.

Director and co-writer Áron Gauder’s “Four Souls of Coyote” would also seem like a natural contender in a very weak Best Animated Feature field, so maybe it has shots at two different Oscar nominations.

Callous capitalists in suits show up to get their pipeline built over and through a sacred mountain, “environmental assessments” be damned. A tribal elder is summoned down from that mountain to join environmentalists and Natives/First Nation people protesting to stop it.

Grandfather (Lorne Cardinal voices the English translation) proceeds to tell his family and the protestors the Story of Creation, as His People understand it.

The Old Creator (Cardinal’s voice as well), directed by the unseen Great Spirit, visits the Earth and ponders its watery state. He is delighted to meet the “first creature,” the duck (Bill Farmer), chat about the place’s possibilities, and send the duck diving for mud, which Old Creator molds into The Land, shaped like a turtle.

He molds creatures, “brothers,” to populate it, as he’s sure he and the duck will run out of things to talk about. The mighty buffalo and others will live on it. And then he makes a mountain for himself to rest on.

But four coyotes, colored red, white, blue and yellow, torment that rest with greedy gripes about having something to eat, maybe someone to mate with.

That’s when the trouble begins. “Coyote” is banished, bashed to bits and burnt in the best Wile E. Coyote fashion over the course of the story. But the clever critter keeps coming back, stealing some of the magic clay to make company for himself — humans.

“Poorly designed and weak,” they may be. But we see human babies experience the Wonders of Creation, and fed meat by the coyote as they grow up, try to ignore the sin that killing is and rationalize their hunger. And we recognize how they gain dominion over the other species, largely through the teaching and intervention of the sneaky trickster Coyote (Diontae Black).

The Old Creator envisions the “progress” that the loin-clothed humans will build, a montage from pyramids to Greek temples onward. And he’s not pleased.

The Satanic “mongrel” Coyote is even blamed for the coming of the White Man, crossing the Big Water by canoe to invite the Spaniards, and by implication, the British, to our shores.

All this is laid out to reinforce the quote that opens the picture, “Only when the last trees have died and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.”

This “Coyote” tail is both connected to myth and visually reminiscent of a “Simpson’s” episode about a hallucinogenic Homer — he’s eaten the hottest chili pepper of them all — meeting his coyote spirit animal who gives him ideas about his “purpose.”

The animation here has its own color palette, which gives this the look of an Eastern European “Secret of the Kells.” Gauder (He did “Nyócker!”) & Co. have produced a festival award winner that compares favorably to some of the best animation coming out of Europe, including Cartoon Saloon, the people who made “Kells” and “Wolfwalker.”

Watching it in Hungarian (you will have other options when it goes into North American release) underscores the story’s universality and the way Native peoples in general and Native Americans in particular are seen as global guides to protecting the environment and bringing planetary ecology back into “harmony.”

Sure that’s stereotyping. But in this case, when a Hungarian film tells a universal story about how “greed” is dooming us, that stereotype becomes the iconography of change — oppressed, nature-connected people leading the short-sighted back into the light.

An Oscar nomination would earn this lovely and engrossing allegory a chance to reach a wide audience. Because most animation fans realize that another “Trolls” or “Chicken Run,” that “Super Mario Brothers” and the latest Pixar (“Elemental”) or Disney (“Wish”) misfires are not the best thing this medium has to offer in 2023.

Rating: TV-14, violence, nudity, childbirth

Cast: The voices of (English language version) Lorne Cardinal, Dionte Black, Karin Anglin, Bill farmer, Clé Bennett and Jonn Eric Bentley.

Credits: Directed by Áron Gauder. scripted by Géza Bereményi and Áron Gauder. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:46