Paradisiacal Gandahar – apparently a state of mind nearly as much as it is a city state – is threatened by a mysterious, evil force that turns the people of the outlying parts of the place to stone via inexplicable rays. The sort-of-government of Gandahar send their best man for this sort of thing, the not completely enthusiastic Syl (voiced by Pierre-Marie Escourrou) to find out what is going on.
Syl soon stumbles into love with the beautiful and typically naked Airelle (Catherine Chevallier), and finds out about some of the darker secrets of his beloved home in form of definitely not beautiful but glorious mutants exiled from it. Rather quickly he understands the threat to be an army of robots and the giant brain – the product of a too successful Gandaharian experiment - that controls them. These are the less strange bits of our hero’s adventures, however.
This third and final of French filmmaker René Laloux’s gloriously weird pieces of full-length science fiction animation is an appropriately mind-blowing tale of weird science, weird time travel, weird romance, and the kind of (weird) visual imagination the French seem culturally predisposed to lavish on their science fiction be it in graphic novels, animation or film. French cinema in this mode is in the business of turning dreams, symbols and most probably drug visions into moving pictures of the most peculiar kind, and Laloux and his various collaborators do this in ways profoundly beautiful and strange - in all of his films.
In this, Gandahar is absolutely of a piece with the director’s other works here. As it is in a philosophical slant that seems fascinated with the concept of communities, or rather, focussed on imagining how collectivism and individualism can be reconciled without fascism rearing its ugly head. Gandahar certainly is anti-fascist, among other, much less clear things, as much as it is dream-like, strange, and peculiarly individual. There’s a mix of sharp intelligence and naivety to Laloux’s writing, and really, his world view, that counteracts the elements in it that could be too hippiesque for some tastes.
The film’s visual design is strange, and often utterly astonishing in its matter of fact treatment of strangeness and otherness that asks its audience to accept all the strange bits and pieces it comes up with before trying, and probably more than just occasionally failing, to understand them.
Of course, Gandahar’s visuals do have to put most of their weight on the design, for the actual animation of these designs in it is pretty terrible. The North Korean studio it was farmed out to did a terrible job with it, animating so lazily and inefficiently, you’ll imagine amateurs at work instead of the professional animators these people actually were.
The thing is, Laloux’s vision is so strong, this hardly matters for the film as a whole, or rather, it’s a mild annoyance in comparison to the rest of Gandahar’s strange, dreamlike beauty. To some viewers, it might even enhance it.
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