Fantastic Planet (review)

Presenting the unphotographable in photographic form has always been one of the primary challenges for – and pleasures of – sf and fantasy cinema. The macrocosms of space, the microcosms of the interior of bodies, speculative futures and mythical pasts, monstrous and alien bodies, fantastic technologies and spectacular metamorphoses have been cobbled together from paint and models, puppets and camera tricks and stitched into the flow of the realtime pro-camera event. From Méliès onward, such cinema has always been formally and technically hybrid.

La Planète sauvage (for English-speaking audiences disappointingly translated as Fantastic – rather than Savage – Planet) was written and directed by René Laloux, designed by Roland Topor, animated at Prague's Jiri Trnka studios and released in 1973. As an animated feature film, Fantastic Planet has a technical and aesthetic homogeneity impossible in spectacular live-action sf: its population of monstrous plants, animals and minerals (and hybrids thereof) are as economical to produce through Topor's drawings as any other familiar or outlandish entity or phenomenon. Indeed the alien and the monstrous occupy not spectacular sequences pacing and punctuating the narrative, but rather incidental and background details. A monster straight out of Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights cheerfully massacres smaller flying frog-like creatures. Silk-producing spherical animals weave clothing around human bodies. Things that appear to be architectural plants behave like predatory animals. An intestinal landscape loops and writhes menacingly as rain falls.

Few of the entities in this savage, vivified environment are named or explained, and they only intermittently affect the human and humanoid characters. Spectacular monstrosity more than compensates for narrative redundancy, however. Animation clings to the primal cinematic and precinematic invocation of the kinetic and metamorphic image, and breathes life into the inanimate.

Adapted from the French sf writer Stefan Wul's Oms en serié (1957), this savage planet is divided into two humanoid species, the giant ruling Draags and relatively tiny Oms (humans – 'hommes'). The Draags are differently humanoid, with webbed ears and blank round eyes that glow when they are engaged in one of their numerous technologically-enhanced contemplative practices. As with any sf movie from another decade it is fun to play at decoding the allegory, though the Draags, with their culture dedicated to knowledge and meditation, cannot be easily mapped onto any particular peril, whether red or technological. The Draags are certainly cruel to the Oms, but these spiritual and civilised oppressors regard Oms as animals not people. In the opening sequence the protagonist Terr, as a baby, is carried by his mother, running from a huge blue hand that casually, repeatedly, and fatally flicks her to the ground. The hand is then revealed to belong to one of a group of Draag children, toying with the Om as if she were a beetle. For the Draags, the Oms occupy a similar position to rodents in contemporary Western homes: one or two may be treasured as pets; wild or multitudinous they are vermin. The scenes towards the end of the film which depict the eradication of the wild Oms are disturbing, reminiscent again of Bosch but with futuristic technologies of extermination. On the other hand, the Oms are initially depicted as savage in the more familiar sense: as warring tribes with cruel games and rituals. As he flees his captivity as pet to a Draag child, Terr takes with him a piece of Draag information technology, a kind of didactic tiara. With it the Oms, like Trotsky's red Indians with rifles, fight back against the exterminators with their own technology and knowledge, though ultimately, on this planet at least, it effects reconciliation, a synthesis and harmony between the species.

The savage planet is not hyperrealist in the sense of most animated features (at least since 1937 and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves) in that it is less reverent of the moving photographic image. As with other adult animated features of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the conventions and...