The animated features directed by René Laloux (1929 – 2004) stand as a fascinating alternative to the CGI and family-friendly narratives that dominate the mainstream of the artform today. From remarkable shorts like Les Dents du Singe (1960) to full-length works like Les Maîtres du Temps (1982), designed by the artist Jean Giraud AKA Moebius, his films are full of genuinely strange imagery and provocative, surreal ideas. His most widely-known effort is probably the truly unique La Planète Sauvage, distributed in English as Fantastic Planet, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 50 years ago this month, winning the Grand Prix.
La Planète Sauvage tells the tale of a conflict between two species on the alien planet Ygam: the small, human-like Oms and the giant, blue-skinned Draags. Due to their size and technologically advanced civilisation, the Draags dominate the world, with the Oms either kept as tame pets or persecuted as wild animals. When one pet Om is accidentally exposed to Draag knowledge, a rebellion is born, with unexpected results for both sides.
The film is based on the 1957 science-fiction novel Oms en Série by Stefan Wul (the pen name of Pierre Pairault, who somewhat unusually balanced his passion for writing with a day-job as a successful dentist). Laloux collaborated on the screenplay with Roland Topor, whose influence on the startling look of the film as graphic designer can barely be overstated. Topor was something of a renaissance man and a significant talent in his own right – a gifted cartoonist and illustrator, he was also an author (most famous for the 1964 novel The Tenant, adapted for cinema by Roman Polanski in 1976) and occasional actor.
Laloux and Topor had already worked together on the shorts Les Temps Morts (1964) and Les Escargots (1965), with the success of the two previous features encouraging them to produce something longer. However, Laloux favoured the use of paper cut-outs over the faster but less detailed cel animation used by studios such as Disney. While his preference was invaluable to the textured look of his work, it was an extremely time-consuming process. A full-length film would necessitate hiring an entire crew of experienced animators — a requirement beyond the capabilities of the French film industry at the time. Topor therefore chose to limit his involvement to the screenplay and initial visual design, leaving the director to assemble a crew and complete the film alone.
Laloux decided to approach the Prague-based Jiři Trnka Studios, utilising a highly skilled crew led by animator Josef Kábrt. The Czech Republic had established a reputation for leading the field in European animation, thanks to pioneering work from the likes of Karel Zeman and Jan Švankmajer. However, when the project began in 1969, the country was also on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, with Laloux the only Frenchmen actively participating in the team. Perhaps inevitably, political intrigues and difficulties added delays to an already artistically ambitious international co-production, with the entire process eventually taking five years to complete.
The sheer hard work of Laloux and his Czech team is visible in every frame of the film, with an abundance of detail and imagination on display throughout. La Planète Sauvage is a riot of bizarre, colourful, and sometimes nightmarish design. The ever-changing terrain of Ygam is a feast of the fantastical, veering from honeycombed vegetation and bulbous veiny sacks with leaves like sails, to an inexplicable field of hissing intestinal growths and a sea of fractured rockets riddled with impossible arcs of looping pipework. A bestiary of strange creatures share the planet with the Oms and the Draags, showcased in brief but highly memorable cameos threaded throughout the narrative. No explanation or context is given for these animals, who resemble escapees from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch – they are simply another part of the rich, mysterious world built by the animators. The look of the animation is illustrative but exquisitely tactile, like a beautifully strange pop-up book brought to life.
The slippery simplicity of the story invites multiple allegorical readings. From its very first sequence, the film emphasises the folly of blind cruelty, drawing audience sympathies towards the most vulnerable. We see an Om mother running with her baby, dressed in neanderthal garb and visibly in distress as she flees through thorny undergrowth. She reaches open ground only to be knocked back down and then dropped to her death by the huge blue hand of a ‘playful’ Draag. Her fate is just a game to the thoughtless alien children, but their casual mistreatment inadvertently sets in motion the events that will shake their cosy world: her orphaned baby survives and grows up to become Terr, the pet Om whose ‘stolen’ knowledge will spark the rebellion of his people.
The lowly status of the Oms can be seen as a plea for animal rights. They are primarily pets, dependant on the whims of their Draag owners. Relatively helpless in the face of mistreatment and neglect, they are forced to fight or prance and perform if they wish to remain in favour. Despite the relative benevolence of his owner Tiwa, Terr’s desire for freedom is motivated by her growing lack of interest in him, with her disregard facilitating the ease of his escape. The Draags could easily be viewed as feckless humans, underestimating the capabilities and feelings of other species and discarding them once their novelty has worn off.
The film is equally open to interpretation as an anti-racist parable. Most of the Draags view the Oms as an inferior race, wilfully ignoring the evidence of their intelligence and keeping their ‘property’ controlled by means of radio-controlled collars. Like human slaves, the Oms have been forcibly taken from their home on Terra with a total lack of ethical concern or compassion. In one scene, the Draags view Terra as a series of rough black-and-white sketches, the contrast with the usual colour and detail of the animation cleverly reflecting their extremely limited view of their ‘less sophisticated’ captives. They use the language of racial bigotry when they label the Oms “vermin” who “reproduce at an alarming rate.” Their ruthless ‘de-ominisation’ culls resemble genocide and ethnic cleansing, mercilessly gassing, crushing, and slaughtering their fellow creatures based on an utterly misguided sense of superiority.
Infamously, the film’s psychedelic surrealism and trippy meditation scenes can be seen as an ode to getting high. However, while the Draags (whose name even resembles the French word for narcotics drogues) do inhale unexplained substances to increase their transcendental abilities, the practice also renders them indolent and self-absorbed. It also proves to be their Achilles’ heel, with the secrets of their meditation turned against them once the Oms reach the titular ‘savage planet’ moon at the climax. The story seems to suggest that while such mental explorations have their worth, too much can only lead to a dangerously selfish sleep.
Ultimately, perhaps the best way to view the film is as a paean to the value of compassionate intelligence and knowledge; Laloux himself defined the story as “a sort of hymn to education” in the 1973 French press book released to promote the animation. Terr’s narration pointedly stresses his delight in learning (a privilege the Draags seem to take for granted). His inadvertent education only occurs due to a fault in his collar, which allows it to pick up transmissions from the headphones used for Tiwa’s lessons – the very symbol of his slavery accidentally enabling his emancipation, right under the noses of his unsuspecting captors. When he runs away, he takes the enormous headphones with him as a prize possession. His passion for knowledge is rewarded when the headset physically preserves his liberty, catching in the undergrowth and saving him from recapture when his collar is activated by Tiwa.
The characters who do not share Terr’s appetite for learning are portrayed as wilfully ignorant fools. The superstitious Om wizard proclaims Draag knowledge to be “bad” and learning a “grave offence,” yet he practices his own magical rituals atop a partially buried statue of a Draag head, and prays to the savage planet that circles Ygam without ever understanding its true purpose. He is eventually killed after refusing to accept Terr’s ability to read the native language, failing to heed all warnings of the coming ‘de-ominisation.’
Education frees the Oms, allowing them to build their rocket ships. Fresh knowledge also awakens the stultified Draags (even if it initially has to be violently inflicted). Both species realise they can only truly prosper once they commit to continual learning and mutual development: a plea for intelligence and co-operation across borders echoed by the international production of the film itself.
The enduring cult status of La Planète Sauvage has seen its stylistic influence creep into the mainstream in unexpected ways. The extraordinary soundtrack by Alain Goraguer has taken on a life of its own, with its wah-wah guitar, thick strings, and funky clavinet praised by bands like Air and sampled by the likes of MF Doom, Flying Lotus, and Madlib. The film’s relatively mature tone and glorious artwork influenced aspects of the seminal French comic Métal Hurlant, which in turn spawned the US sci-fi anthology Heavy Metal and helped pave the way for today’s adult graphic novel industry. Its combination of adventure and allegory has arguably influenced the Studio Ghibli fantasy epics of Hayao Miyazaki, notably Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997). Stylistic influence aside, Laloux’s plea to reject blind hatred and celebrate education only seems more urgent 50 years on. Perhaps the most appropriate way to mark the film’s anniversary would be for its message to finally creep into the mainstream, too.
