Week of December 26, 2007, Issue #636
FILM
DVDetective
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
I suppose it’s only natural that when the holidays come, with their particular mixture of forbidding weather and spare time, one gets cravings for childish things, for the comfort of images and stories that allow for curling up before the boob tube and bringing back some sense of raw wonder. So it is that every year around this time I find myself itching to see Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage) again, that infinitely strange 1973 Franco-Czech co-production that knocked me out when I first saw it as a kid and continues to fascinate me with its sheer imaginative prowess as an adult.Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and the first animated film to ever be considered for such an honour, Fantastic Planet made an unprecedented impact upon its initial release, though its handful of elements that are inappropriate for kids—like the nudity, philosophical digressions and rampant death—probably handicapped it in terms of its staying power in the cartoon canon. Neither an easily digestible family film nor a raunchy, Ralph Bakshi sort of R-rated film, it hovers in its own bizarre little universe, slowly nurturing its small cult following, which will hopefully continue to grow with the release of Accent Cinema’s nicely supplemented new DVD.
Narrated by Terr, an Om captured by Draags as a baby before escaping back into the wild as a teenager, Fantastic Planet introduces us to a Bosch-inspired world where the dominant air of creepy tranquility is constantly punctuated by acts of thoughtless violence. The Oms are basically humans like us, living in desperation and squalour in the fleshy foliage outside of the Draag civilization. The Draags are, or at least appear to be, superior beings, vaguely fish-like humanoids crazy for protracted meditation sessions, hairless, svelte, soft-spoken beings that tower high over the Oms, using them only for the amusment of their children and resorting to exterminating them when they become inconvenient.
What’s initially so compelling about the whole set-up is just how counterintuitive it all feels to the conventional hippy ideology of the day, with the Draags not coming across as obviously evil but rather radiating intelligence, reason and above all a Zen-like calm. During his daily meditation ritual, a Draag’s pupils vanish and a small version of his body appears inside a floating bubble, which finally takes to the sky where it drifts amidst countless others, trippy as all hell. The Oms, in comparison, live under constant threat from their hostile surroundings, not only from Draags but a fanciful bestiary of malicious, carnivorous plants, worms, vaginal orifices and winged things, not to mention each other, since they’ve divided themselves into warring factions and maintain fear and prejudice toward Oms that have been raised in captivity, like Terr, the outsider who will come to be their saviour.
Based on a novel by Czech fantasist Stefan Wul and adapted by director René Laloux and graphic designer Roland Topor (probably best known these days for writing the novel upon which Roman Polanski’s The Tenant was based), Fantastic Planet invites any number of allegorical readings—what with the importance of knowledge and tools reaching the weaker beings, I suppose a Marxist take is probably the best fit—though no single such reading can fully interpret every layer of writhing weirdness on display. What I remember taking away from the film as a kid was mostly just a sense that anyone can be good or bad, right or wrong, depending on the context, and that any organized struggle needs a hero at the centre to speak the truths that no one wants to hear. I also just remember watching the film and feeling afterwards that absolutely everything is scary, even my mom’s fake ferns.
The DVD features another similarly superb Laloux-Topor collaboration from 1965 entitled Les Escargots, as well as a pretty so-so music video from Sean Lennon inspired by Fantastic Planet. What I found most interesting here was a 25-minute featurette mostly comprised of interview footage with the late Laloux. An unsurprisingly eccentric guy—he declares that what the movie world needs most is a more “schizophrenic cinema”—Laloux tells terrific stories about the events that changed his life, such as meeting the equally insane Topor and getting a job at a clinic for the mentally ill, where he made his first animated films in collaboration with the patients. He also articulates the differences between the unique sort of animation we see in Fantastic Planet and the sort we commonly see today, a distinction largely characterized by emphasizing quality of graphics over fluidity of movement. And maybe this goes some way to explaining why Fantastic Planet still lingers with me after all these years: its imagery is just so rich. V