The Fantastic Planet (1973)

Original title: Le Planète Sauvage

Somewhere, some time, a race of blue giants called the Traags live curious lives of psychic, machine-based learning and pretty psychedelic looking meditations. The latter seem to take up most of their time. Still, these people are down to Earth (or Ygam, in their case) enough to hold pets. Namely, what they call the Oms (a really subtle play on the French word “homme”, of course), little hairless monkey creatures they took on an expedition to a planet you might have heard of called Terra that seems to have become somewhat post-apocalyptic, the film suggests. The tale is narrated by the grown-up version of a little Om boy whose “owner”, the young daughter of a leader of the Traags, gave him the name “Terr”. Through happenstance, Terr gains access to the same psychic teaching material used to educate his owner, so he learns to speak and understand rather a lot about the peculiar world he finds himself in. Both will be very useful skills once a grown-up Terr flees into the wilds where small clans of escaped and free-born humans live and try to avoid the Traags’ regular attempts at exterminating what they only see as animal pests.

Eventually, Terr will become a catalyst in bringing changes to the relationship between the two races.

As a rule, I am not much of a fan of fantastic cinema – nor literature, for that matter – that trades heavily in the allegorical, even if, like in the case of French director René Laloux’s film here, I’m perfectly fine with the politics being allegorized. I’ve never quite understood why you’d use an allegory this obvious when you could simply straight-up say what you mean. There’s a strange thing about the simple and obvious allegory here, however, for if you read half a dozen pieces about the film, you’ll find half a dozen different readings of what the allegory actually means, from racism (which seems to me the clear and obvious reading), to animal rights, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which happened right when this was animated there, and drew out the production for years), or, if you’re Gene Siskel (together with his buddy Ebert always there for the most clueless view of any given genre movie), druggy nonsense. All of which might suggest something about the subjectivity of interpretation, even of the obvious.

Be it as it may, one of the virtues of Laloux’s film is its complete lack of a moralizing tone even while it tells a moral story. The plot itself – the script was written by Laloux with the great writer Roland Topor and is based on a novel by Stefan Wul – is about as simple and matter of fact as things go. This stands in grand contrast to Fantastic Planet’s biggest selling point for someone of my tastes: aesthetics where nothing looks straight, or straightforward, or seems to belong to the world a viewer might simply understand. The visual imagination on display maybe does owe a little to the drug trippyness of its production time, but rather more to surrealism and European traditions of non-naturalistic art. The diverging Czech and French approaches to the surrealist and the strange come together rather wonderfully into scenes that are at times alien, funny, grotesque, just plain weird, and always a little bit mind-blowing, really giving the whole thing the air of a tale neither taking place on the shores we know nor told there, adding the quality of watching a myth from a very different and strange place. This gives Fantastic Planet a particularly curious quality: of being absolutely of its time in its ideas about the world and how to present it and its general ideas about life, yet also so strangely situated in a place that never actually existed that it becomes something singular.