Kritiken

It’s a visual and sonic playground, and it taught me a lot about what I could get away with even in a live-action film—how to make something so arresting but not tied to reality.

A scene that immediately comes to mind when I think of this movie is when the characters go into a trance, and images of what they're picturing appear on their heads. It's super dreamy and kind of like a slideshow. The director made sure that the transitions from one drawing to the next were beautiful, that he could hover in that in-between space and it would be interesting.

While Topor's animation is relatively simple, his surreal character and background designs are elegant to the point of being cool and enhance the dispassionate manner in which this fable on the dangers of absolute power unfolds.

With the exception of a few jolting zooms, the "camera" in Fantastic Planet is a cold, stationary observer, which only emphasizes the otherness of this world. Laloux and Topor's most enduring achievement is in yoking this disorientating effect to familiar horrors; by the film's conclusion, it's hard to feel comfortable with similar episodes on our own imperfect planet.

Its peculiar universe is instantly recognizable from virtually any freeze-frame, and the film as a whole is so rich, strange, and sui generis that nothing has emerged since to retrospectively blunt its impact.

Originally released in 1973, René Laloux's animated sci-fi parable Fantastic Planet still looks strikingly alien, over four decades later. Its visual ideas are so outré that few have been borrowed or referenced by subsequent films.

The beauty and bewitching power of the film's animation has often underscored the political power of the film, for better and for worse. Drawing from disparate influences from psychedelia and surrealism, an alluring and cold universe is forged. Scale evokes a sense of awe, as scenes and shots are framed through shifts from micro to macro.

The surreal and perilous world of FANTASTIC PLANET (originally LA PLANETE SAUVAGE) is rendered in beautiful (very 70s) cut out stop motion. Highlights include a glow-orgy induced by an aphrodisiac communion wafer and a cackling anthropomorphized Venus flytrap. The soundtrack is a near-constant synth jam that oscillates from moody and spacey to raunchy porn funk.

Borowcyk would have been the ideal choice for this serenely cruel animated reverie, though Laloux and writer-designer Roland Topor achieve their own trippy alchemy by giving the fable a Tanguy perspective. Terr's escape and the feral Oms' exodus toward one of the planet's moons chart out the uncanny landscape -- crystals sprout like mushrooms and are vanquished by whistling, a chortling Venus flytrap exists solely to grab and crush birds, roots and crevasses and canals are woozily sexualized.

This is simply one of the loveliest, most moving films I've ever seen.

For fans of those two monoliths [Disney and Miyazaki], Fantastic Planet may be either a breathtaking and therefore worthy departure from animated norms, or a miserable, unnecessarily experimental deviation. For this reviewer, Laloux's masterpiece is clearly the former. Based on Stefan Wul's novel La Planète sauvage and drawing parallels to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes (the 1968 film and Pierre Boule's 1963 novel), the film resonates with radical political and historical allegories drenched in European aesthetic principles.

Eerie, surreal and a welcome respite from Disney-style animation, this French sci-fi allegory may not offer any mind-blowing insights (genocide is bad isn't exactly a new thought), but it's a trip... The look is Monty Python crossed with Eastern-European art animation and the images have a timelessly bizarre quality, '70s wacka-chucka wacka-chucka soundtrack notwithstanding.