Country: France, Czechoslovakia
Language: French, Czech with English subtitles

Cult 101 at Gateway Film Center

A celebration of the best cult films of all time.

About the film:

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence.

With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.

“too singular to feel beholden to a particular era… It truly earns the adjective in its title.”

—Mike D’Angelo, AV Club

Images courtesy of Janus Films

About the filmmaker:

René Laloux was born in Paris in 1929, and studied painting before working in a psychiatric institution, and making his first short animated films with the interns there. He made three full-length animated films later in his life with varying degrees of recognition, collaborating with some of the most gifted and challenging artists of his generation. He was a writer and director, known for Fantastic Planet (1973), The Masters of Time (1982) and Les escargots (1966). He died in 2004 in Angoulême, Charente, France.

MAJOR SUPPORT
Ohio Arts Council
Greater Columbus Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Campus Partners
National Endowment for the Arts

WITH HELP FROM
WWCD Radio
G&J Pepsi
WOSU Public Media