Gandahar (1987)

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.

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.