Fantastic Planet

I first saw the images of Fantastic Planet (French: La Planete Sauvage; literally, "The Wild Planet") while watching "Night Flight," the old i980s variety show that ran for two hours on Friday and Saturday nights on the USA Cable network as a child. The film left an indelible impact on me, or at least, what I could absorb of it at the time. The sage of the blue, gargantuan "Traags" and the diminutive and oppressed "Oms" (who are kept as pets when not killed outright, was still waiting for me to see the whole thing, many years in the future.

The animation may be criticized for being crude, even flat. The actual artistry of the film, the visual splendor of it, is beyond compare. It is its own alien landscape of modernist wonder. This stark visual plane delivers the viewer to a new place, a Savage Planet, wherein the massive, blue-skinned, red-eyed, fin-eared "Tiwa" cares for the little, tiny human "Om," whose mother has been killed by three of her own species. She is unusually loving toward Terr the Om but fits him with a restraining collar as her parents instruct. A defect in the collar allows Terr to access the same telepathic learning (the Traggs are great sender/receivers, who practice a form of "meditation" that allows them to astrally project, their conscious minds riding around in bubbles.

Lo and behold, Terr escapes, having risen to adulthood and taking Tiwa's learning collar with him. In the wasteland (the landscape of the Savage Planet is festooned with weird sculpture-like outgrowths of rock and bizarre plant and monstrous animal life) he meets a young Om woman who introduces Terr to her tribe of tree-dwelling Oms. The Chieftain of the Tree Oms is at first reluctant to accept Terr, who is roundly mocked and laughed at for being dressed in jester's garbs, as Tiwa's pet. In time he is accepted, though, and his theft of the learning bracelet is invaluable in helping Oms to learn to read Traag.

They soon find out they are to be the subject of what amounts to an "ethnic cleansing."

To say any more would ruin the film. The visual odyssey here is a wonderful counterpoint to the message of "turnabout": i.e. making humans the pets" of an arrogant, powerful, seemingly-superior race. The film stops being cutesy animation at the point that the genocide of the Oms begins (in horrific, modernistic, machine-like ways). The fact that the French lived under Nazi occupation, that they struggled so valiantly against it, was of course a then far from distant memory to the makers of this film.

The "Fantastic Planet' to which the title of the film refers is actually a moon circling the planet of the Traags, in which a final, surrealistic surprise is presented to the viewer, a dreamlike dance of headless statues powered by Traag soul-bubbles. These are "mating ritual machines" it seems, for building alliances and off-world colonies. In the end, it is this that turns the tide in favor of the Oms.

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The film was written and directed by René Laloux and the famous Roland Topor, who was a cartoonist, painter, novelist, playwright, actor--you name it. He played Renfield in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu (1979), which starred Klaus Kinski in the titular role and was known for the surrealist and transgressive bent of his fictional oeuvre. He was of Polish-Jewish descent, immigrating to France to escape Nazi persecution, but falling under the jurisdiction of the Third Reich killing apparatus anyway. Topor's father ended up interred at Pithiviers transit camp, on his way to Auschwitz (Wikipedia records that only 159 inmates of THOUSANDS survived the transit camp). Topor's father managed to escape; the landlady often cajoled the children to give up the whereabouts of their father, if they know. Topor thus must have been emotionally invested to a great degree in the subtext of the film. The film source material was an obscure French Science fiction novel Oms en série (1957) by Stefan Wul, which was not translated into English until 2010.

One should definitely not miss this animated classic of metaphorical science fiction, this dreamy French art masterpiece with a deeper, hidden meaning; although, even though rated in America as "PG," it would probably be a bit much for young children. It's undeniably a great, classic film, whether or not you live on Ygam, the planet of the Traags, or walk the confines of this Wild Planet alone.

Note: It is interesting to note that the English version of Fantastic Planet included voiceovers from actors such as Barry Bostwick, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974), and Marvin Miller, who voiced Robbie the Robot in the film Forbidden Planet (1956).

Fantastic Planet (1973) Trailer