La Planète Sauvage

"La Planète Sauvage" (Fantastic Planet, 1973) is a milestone among surreal animations. It is a very good example to illustrate how various artists contribute to a single project. To begin with, it is the first feature length film of René Laloux, whose earlier shorts are of an interesting sort of experimental animation: he made many of them with the assistance of the interns of a psychiatric institute he was working at. The drawings are made by Roland Topor, whose name will surely reappear through some of his other works in this blog. It is also a rare if not the the only feature length animation exclusively made using paper cut-outs in Jiří Trnka's studio in Prague. The hypnotic music is composed by French jazz musician Alain Goraguer, and finally the story is based on a book by Stefan Wul, a dentist turned writer of science fiction. The result is a peculiar world of strangely alienated feelings, fearsomely savage for those who have not yet learned its secrets. The story goes as follows: On a mysterious planet, a giant species, the Draags keep humanlike creatures, called Oms (French wordplay on "hommes", man) as pets. An Om called Terr (wordplay on terrible and Earth) grows up in captivity, then escapes and leads the wild Oms against the Draags. It is his fearless desire to share knowledge that helps the Oms to evolve and alter their primitive conditions. The central theme is the confrontation of a highly developed civilization with uneducated intelligence. Whether the two races can learn to live in peace together, we only learn at the end...