Fantastic Planet (1973)

Fantastic Planet is a 1973 animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux and written by Laloux and Roland Topor.

Directed by René Laloux. With Barry Bostwick, Jennifer Drake, Eric Baugin, Jean Topart. On a faraway planet where blue giants rule, oppressed humanoids rebel against their machine-like leaders.

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.

Amazon.com: Fantastic Planet: Barry Bostwick, Jennifer Drake, Eric Baugin, Jean Topart, Jean Valmont, Sylvie Lenoir, Michèle Chahan, Yves Barsacq, Hubert de Lapparent, Gérard Hernandez, Claude Joseph, Philippe Ogouz, Boris Baromykin, René Laloux, Anatole Dauman, André Valio-Cavaglione, Simon Damiani, Roland Topor, Stefan Wul: Movies & TV

This futuristic story takes place on a faraway planet where giants rule, and oppressed humanoids rebel against the machine-like leaders.

Originally released in 1973, René Laloux’s animated sci-fi parable Fantastic Planet still looks strikingly alien, over four decades later. Its visual ideas are so outré that few have been borrowed or referenced by subsequent films, and Laloux himself made only two other features (most notably 1988’s Gandahar, which was released in the U.S. as Light Years). Not that Laloux’s imagination was the prime mover, in any case—most of Fantastic Planet’s fantastic design work came from the mind of Roland Topor, a French illustrator who’d teamed with Alejandro Jodorowsky to create a new surrealist movement in the ’60s. (Topor also wrote the source novel for Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and played Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre. He was quite the interesting guy.) The nonhuman creatures are still humanoid, in order to make the intended allegory clear, but this world’s other details are so mesmerizingly weird that Criterion, which is releasing the film next week, probably wishes it could sell a pouch of primo weed with each DVD.

Trailer for "Fantastic Planet" (1973). AKA "La Planète sauvage".

A jarring examination of racism and intolerance.

On a faraway planet where giants rule, oppressed humanoids rebel against the machine-like leaders. Fantastic Planet is animated epic that is by turns surreal and lovely, fantastic and graceful.