FANTASTIC PLANET (La Planète sauvage) (1973) is a wholly unique experience in animated features. It was made a couple years before I even was, and to this day they don’t make ‘em like this. Soon, though. One of these days it’s gonna catch fire the way anime giant robots did, or fairy tale musicals, or computer animated comedy adventures with a high concept and it’s funny but then it’s serious but don’t worry also it’s still funny, yet surprisingly sweet. Have you seen any animated movies like that? I’ve seen a couple.

That’s gonna be the pattern with FANTASTIC PLANET, too – every entertainment conglomerate and their sister company is gonna come up with their variation on a bizarre alien world with strange creatures and plants, set to kinda funky psych music, animated with cut-outs of ink and colored pencil drawings, looking like the cover of an old sci-fi paperback that you read and can’t quite figure out which scene they’re depicting there. That’s what the people want so there will be a hundred movies like that and they’ll all blend together and be okay but never as good as the original.

This is the story of a guy named Terr (Jean Valmont, IS PARIS BURNING?), who lives on the planet Ygam. He’s an Om, which is Ygam for human – they were transplanted here, like mogwais (if you, like me, believe the GREMLINS novelization). He narrates the story and in the opening scene he and his mother are chased by Draags, the blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoids who are the dominant species on Ygam. Relative to a Draag, Oms are tiny, maybe bigger than a bug to us, but smaller than a mouse or a smurf.

The Draags seem like savage giant monsters, then you realize they’re just kids playing around, flicking at a little creature they don’t know to have empathy for, knocking her down a hill over and over until she dies. The kids run off, but another Draag named Tiwa (Jennifer Drake) comes along, feels sorry for the crying baby, takes it home as a pet and names it Terr. She plays with him, dresses him up, puts him in a little playset. Sometimes he bites her finger, mostly he plays nice.

The visual style is weird, the tone is weird, and every aspect of Draag life is weird. They look naked, but the designs on their bodies can change. Their eyes don’t open or close, just light up red or dim back to the same blue as the rest of them. They regularly meditate, telepathically transporting their consciousness to “the wild planet” that orbits Ygam. The design of some of their machines and structures seem more influenced by pomegranates, sea anemones and heirloom squash than by Earth technology. Their version of the news is that their leaders debate at a table on top of a giant block with jumbo screens on each side showing each of their faces, and it’s inside a stadium with a live audience.

Terr grows up to be an unusual Om because he loves to listen to Tiwa’s headset where she gets her school lessons. He knows all kinds of shit from this voice with a large vocabulary of scientific words that I think are specific to Ygam concepts, but let’s be honest, I wouldn’t know them anyway. As Tiwa gets older she loses interest in him (see also: Jesse in TOY STORY 2; I guess I can in fact compare this to other animated features) so he runs away with her headset.

A free Om woman in the woods sees Terr being yanked back to his owners by the collar he’s forced to wear, so she snips it off and brings him to her people, who laugh at his clothes and mock him as a “tame Om.” So we learn about the whole world of wild Oms, with different factions, beliefs, and customs. Sort of like Mrs. Brisby in THE SECRET OF NIMH (okay, there’s another one), he has to get them to work together to survive when he finds out the Draags are about to do their bi-annual “de-Oming,” or fumigation, of the park where many of the Om live.

See, that dumb little baby is an important figure in Ygam history because he brought Tiwa’s headset, got other Oms to listen to it, they took the time to learn how to read the Draag language and build off of their technology. This changes everything.

It’s not just the alien details of the world and the strangeness of the style that make it transporting – I think it helps that even the allegory doesn’t directly line up with Earth shit. It’s not all a metaphor for one thing, it can be applied in at least a couple different ways.

Of course the early scenes really put you in the perspective of animals. You can see how terrifying it is just to be picked up by a well-meaning, friendly Draag, and it’s so upsetting to see how Terr’s mother is just casually snuffed out and he’s put into this whole different life with no choice and no thought given to it. They just think he’s cute so they take him.

But then when we get into the world of Oms it’s obviously not an animal rights story anymore. They have traditions of settling disputes through battle (with biting creatures tied to their chests) and despite being “tame” he turns out to excel at it – being played with by the allegedly more civilized Draags made him pretty savage, I think. There’s an interesting thread about class resentment and anti-intellectualism, as some of the Oms threaten Terr and his friends for learning Draag knowledge from the headset.

I like that with the meditation and everything the Draags seem highly enlightened and peaceful among themselves, but many of them remain oblivious to the immorality of how they treat the Oms. As much as the Draag try to dehumanize the Om as vermin, they are clearly an intelligent species with a civilization. So to me it becomes a story about asymmetrical warfare, with the militarily inferior Oms managing to kill one Draag as a genocide is about to be committed against them, and some of the Draags use that to justify the genocide they were already planning anyway. But (SPOILERS) this is a fable, so we get to have a utopian ending where they realize the answer is to learn from each other, make concessions, share the planet and benefit from each others’ contributions. If only.

When director René Laloux was 13 years old he did an apprenticeship with his woodcarver uncle to help support the family while his dad was in the French Resistance fighting Nazis. After the war he got into plays and puppetry and cinema clubs, until he was forced into military service in Austria (he was not a fan). He became a filmmaker during a later job at La Borde, a groundbreaking (and still existent) psychiatric clinic where patients are free to roam, involved in decision making and encouraged to create art. He first used paper cut out animation in a surreal 14-minute short called Monkey Teeth, which was based on ideas suggested by patients.

At the ceremony where he won a prize for the short, Laloux met the artist Roland Topor (co-founder of The Panic Movement along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal). They began to collaborate on short films, which led to Topor designing and writing FANTASTIC PLANET, based on the 1957 novel Oms en série by Stefan Wul (pen name of dental surgeon turned sci-fi author Pierre Pairault). Judging from plot summaries I’ve read, this is a faithful adaptation of the book. Topor created the look but managed to avoid having to be involved in the painstaking animation, which was overseen by Josef Kábrt at the Czechoslovakian studio founded by the great stop motion director Jiří Trnka.

The score is by Alain Goraguer, a pianist who, among other credits, played with Serge Gainsbourg. It could definitely be described as groovy with its harpsichord and wah-wah and shit, but also sounds sad. I recognized its themes from being sampled on “Come on Feet” by Quasimoto and “Everybody Stay Calm” by Run the Jewels. Here’s a well-put-together video about some of the songs that have sampled it:

I first saw FANTASTIC PLANET when I was pretty young and I liked it, but now it’s even better. I remember a time when its reputation was mostly as a weird movie to get high to, then as the weird movie seen on a screen in THE CELL. In 2016 Criterion put it out – their first animated feature, I believe – so for a while it’s been respectable again. But when I complimented a guy’s t-shirt at a screening of FURIOSA he was shocked – said nobody ever knew what it was. So if anybody reading this had never heard of FANTASTIC PLANET, now you have. Glad I could help.