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Reviewed by:
  • Gandahar, and: Les Maîtres du temps
  • Paul Wells (bio)
Gandahar (René LalouxFrance/North Korea1988). Eureka. PAL region 2. 1.33:1 original aspect ratio. £19.99.
Les Maîtres du temps (René LalouxFrance/Switzerland/West Germany/UK/ Hungary1982). Eureka. PAL region 2. 1.66:1 original aspect ratio, 16:9 anamorphic. £19.99.

In an era in which computer animation informs both the 'new traditionalism' of the Pixar, Dreamworks and Blue Sky studios and the photorealistic visual effects of much mainstream movie-making, it is pertinent to recall that the freedoms of expression available in animation have readily facilitated significantly more personal and progressive visions. For example, Parisian animator René Laloux's extraordinary features and shorts from the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate how animation can be used to render fantastical images as vehicles for political enquiry and philosophical proposition, and are far removed from the narrative predictabilities and heart-warming reassurance of current Hollywood cartoon features. While Wall•E (Stanton US 2008) may make a significant claim to be one of the most challenging feature-length animated films, offering an unremittingly bleak view of humanity, and while Happy Feet (Miller, Coleman and Morris US/Australia 2006) or Kung Fu Panda (Osborne and Stevenson US 2008) might well represent a partial return to mainstream animated 'movies with a message', they are still a far cry from the challenge played out in Laloux's features – La Planète sauvage (Czechoslovakia/France 1973), Les Maîtres du temps and Gandahar. Grounded in a deliberate visual artifice employing contemporary graphic design and illustration, as well as sources in fine art, Laloux's animation seeks to tell stories less through traditional narrative arcs and character development than through symbol and metaphor. As his contemporary compatriot, Michel Ocelot, creator of the Kirikou films (1998, 2005) and Azur et Asmar (Spain/Italy/Belgium/France 2006), has remarked, such practice insists on 'making the audience intelligent' (interview with author, July 2008).

Laloux's work is consistently characterised by a playful mix of inventive science fantasy aesthetics, the interrogation of ideological struggle and a self-conscious use of the distinctive vocabularies of frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation. While clearly the signature author of his work, Laloux's engagement with literary sources, and his collaborations with distinctive designers and illustrators – Roland Topor, Moebius, Philippe Caza – and animation artists from [End Page 153] countries other than his native France, operate as enriching aspects of his films. Such an approach ensures the films work on a number of levels, and speak to social concerns and a quasi-utopian outlook, both in the content of the work and the desire for collaboration. In this he had many kindred spirits within the animation community, who embraced the humanitarian potential seemingly embedded within the language of animation itself.

In their constant depiction of organic worlds, mutable forms and cultures-influx, and the implicit tensions about control and conformity which attend such shape-shifting, Laloux's films work as allegories about animating itself as much as they address significant political concerns. It is clear that in adopting the sf/ fantasy genre, Laloux saw an opportunity to attach his own aesthetic and social concerns to the anticipated codes and conventions – delineating future worlds, space travel, anomalies in time, aliens and modern technologies – and thus to subvert them. Like most sf, though, Laloux's work is always talking about the here-and-now of human folly, even though his preoccupations are consistently grounded in bigger ideological anxieties about the conditions which might permit the return of quasi-fascist regimes or the oppressions of authoritarian models of government. While animation is often accused of diluting the impact of its subject matter (its illusionism still somehow associated with naïveté and innocence), Laloux amplifies his concerns through a rich variety of symbolic imagery, often using particular kinds of visual abstraction to intimate takenfor granted concepts, prompting a Brechtian shock of realisation. Laloux sees his animation as an intrinsically adult concern, within the abstract interrogations of the most imaginative sf.

Indeed, as a further aside, it is worth noting that in essence, animation's association with children, childhood, and innocuous entertainment is not really about the nature...

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