Fantastic Planet (1973)
Director: René Laloux Run Time: 72 min. Rating: PG Release Year: 1973
Starring: Gérard Hernandez, Jean Valmont, Jeanine Forney, Jennifer Drake, Yves Barsacq
Country: France, Czechoslovakia
Language: French, Czech
Presented as part of Mammoth Mondays, a new extension of Cult 101.
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.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 for The AV Club
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.
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.
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