Yesterday evening I watched the most bizarre animated movie I’ve ever seen. A dear friend of mine suggested me this film while she was passing by Lisbon.
I just watched it without expectations, but I knew it had to be something special, otherwise, my friend wouldn’t have suggested it.
Fantastic Planet is a psychedelic metaphor to depict the condition animals endure since humans took over planet Earth. In this movie, humans are just “animals” domesticated by the alien race Draag. It seems that the Draags collected some humans from Earth (abduction) and farmed them as pets.
The opening scene shows a woman running with her baby, away from giant blue hands, across an alien landscape. At some point, one giant hand lifts the woman up and up. She has to leave her baby on the ground. The giant hand releases the woman, and she plummets to the ground. She dies right in front of her baby. The next screen reveals some Draag kids, who were playing with their humans (the woman and the child), or their “Oms” as they call humans.
The baby Om will grow up beside Tiwa, a Draag kid who really loves her Om and will treat him with such regard that will even irritate her parents.
But what happens when your Om escapes and discovers that some other Oms live free in the wild? This is the beginning of a mind-bending journey across a dream worth of Salvador Dali’!
“Deprived of lessons, I decided to run away”
I wonder what would happen if our cats and dogs could learn our language and acquire our knowledge… In my misanthropic moments, I hope it will happen and that they will take revenge. In other moments, I feel scared by the thought!
Without spoiling too much of the story, I was shocked but not surprised by the reaction of wild Oms to the knowledge brought by the “tamed Om”, Terr. He has learned the Draag writing and acquired a lot of knowledge about their technology too! Most of the wild Oms are fascinated by Terr’s knowledge, but a small group, including the shaman, don’t trust Terr. Or better, they see him as a threat and start to spread “fake news” about him. It’s a typical reaction that we keep seeing nowadays when people face something or someone new, they don’t know anything about. In this situation you usually have two choices: you learn about it (hard path), or you make up stories about it and recur to superstition (easy path).
It was 1973, and creativity in cinema was everything! Creativity was so powerful that it could even overcome national and ideological borders! The production of this animated masterpiece was indeed split between France and Czechoslovakia, which back then used to sit on the other side of the iron curtain. It was hard for anyone to trespass that barbed fence, but not for cinematic artists.
Fantastic Planet is a refreshing shower of pure imagination to remind us of what real cinematic art is and what it should be!
If you’re a fan of Salvador Dali’, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or psychedelic art in general, you will love it! If you’re not, you may still love it. For sure, you won’t be the same anymore (in a good way!).
My score: 9/10!