Laloux's animated science-fiction film is certainly of its time. Not in its story: an alien planet ruled by giant blue humanoids called Draags, who keep humans as pets (Oms), is used as an allegory for the dehumanising way humans treat one another - something common to much sci-fi. No, what really places Fantastic Planet in the early 70s is the eerie music, visuals, and the stilted, slow pace of the dialogue.
The copy I watched was an English dub from the original French, but also had subtitles which I couldn't turn off. The words spoken, and the words on screen, did not always match up - usually they were phrased differently. This made an already trippy film even more strange.
The animation is not like the bright colours we see in mainstream animation - this is not Disney, Pixar or Studio Ghibli. There is a flatness to the visuals as well. However, the opening scene really captures the scale of the world of the Draags. We follow a naked mother carrying her baby as she runs terrified from something unseen. Suddenly some large blue hands enter the frame and play with her like she is a mouse. When she dies, the hands pick up the baby, and then we see the hugeness of the Draags (and these are only the children) compared to the Oms.
From there we spend the first part of the film learning about the Draags world as the young Om Terr grows up - each Draag week is equal to a human year, so Terr quickly grows older than his child-captor. Terr learns the secrets of the Draags' knowledge under the Draags' noses - they believe Oms are too stupid to learn anything. The story eventually kicks in as Terr escapes and encourages other Oms to revolt. They learn about how humans got to the planet Ygam, and exactly what Draags do when they meditate (one of the weirdest scenes in the whole film).
This animation is not for children as it deals with some rather adult ideas, and its visuals are way more abstract than mainstream animation. The allegory is not subtle, but the skill of the images, particularly the attention to scale, and the disquieting music, are the reasons to see the film.
A terrific film! Working towards the 1001 myself so I watched it recently. Love the animation and the flatness that you mentioned; it builds a cool mood.
ReplyDeleteThe great thing about this list is the stuff you see which you otherwise would never find!
DeleteI am glad I watched the film, I do like a bit of strangeness. Though I don't know if I'll revisit it anytime soon. I think it will stick with me for a while!
This is the third time in just a few weeks that you reviewed something that I was about to watch or that I just watched. I saw it years and years ago, but I saw it on the TCM schedule and DVRed it and watched it again over the weekend. Great movie!
ReplyDeleteYou don't have Napoleon scheduled, do you? I watched it in segments over the last two days. SO AWESOME! I would like to see it in an old theater in Paris or Marseilles with a bunch of drunken Frenchman. The actress playing Josephine looks like Thelma Todd. And the guy playing DeLisle (who wrote Le Marseillaise) looks like Dwight Frye!
No, watched Napoleon a while ago, though I should give it a re-watch, it is one of my favourite silent films. Nothing is more epic!
DeleteI watched it online on a site that had Cyrillic lettering, so I guess it was a Russian site. The titles were in English, but when they appeared, a guy would read the Russian translation.
DeleteThat sounds mildly distracting!
DeleteI'm getting sort of getting used to stuff like that because some of the movies I want to see are kind of hard to find (especially for free!) and I have to take what I can get. I watched Mon Oncle dubbed in Italian with no sub-titles. I watched two Bunuel films (Terra sin pan and The Milky Way) in French with Spanish sub-tiles. (Fortunately I read Spanish pretty well, even though I don't speak it well at all.) That was what I found on YouTube.
DeleteAlso on YouTube, I came across the 1921 German version of Hamlet where Hamlet is a girl masquerading as a man (played by Danish Asta Nielsen, a huge star in Europe at the time) and there were no translations for the German inter-titles. But I know enough German that I muddled through it, though there were numerous captions where I had no idea what they were saying.
The only time I just gave up was when I tried to watch Mother India. The narration was a language I didn't understand and the sub-titles were in an alphabet I didn't recognize. I toughed it out for about ten minutes before I decided I just wasn't getting anything out of the experience.
I had never heard of this one before reading this review. It sounds like a very interesting experience. I imagine reading English subtitles that don't match the English being spoken is very distracting. Sounds like it was worth the effort, though.
ReplyDeleteIt was distracting, and made it all stranger. But I would recommend seeing it. Its a cult movie, though it was marketed as a kids film when first released in France. It really is not, and I can only imagine how confused those kids would have been.
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