The Fantastic Planet (1973)

Rarely has a titular adjective so accurately captured the experience of watching a movie as in Fantastic Planet. The film's alternate universe is both totally an element of fantasy, and fantastic in its vernacular sense: an absolute marvel to behold. Rene Laloux's animated French-language allegory takes trippiness to new levels of pure imagination, conjuring a planet where humans are both domesticated pet and outlaw nuisance to the native rulers. These rulers, the skyscraper-sized Traags, are blue humanoids with red eyes and vaguely aquatic features -- but who otherwise are pretty genial, intellectual beings. It's no coincidence we're supposed to see ourselves in them, but Fantastic Planet is no mere plea for us to trade places with the Earth creatures we so callously enslave and kill. Masterfully, Laloux's film also invites us to identify with the humans, whose spirit of determination inspires them to an against-all-odds uprising. But however many ways Fantastic Planet invites reflection, it's at least as interested in wowing its audiences with otherworldly technology, flora and fauna. The film pauses to flesh these out through atmospheric vignettes, featuring tall plants that whip the air aimlessly, intricate groves of multi-colored trees, small bulbous-eyed creatures that make clothing by foaming bubbles from their mouths, or giant winged beasts that scream in frightening bursts. (The sound design is a discussion in and of itself, consisting of excellently 1970s computerized beeps and boops, plus a soundtrack that could accompany a porn movie from that era, without that being the least bit silly). The Traags are a fully realized entity both familiar and unsettlingly foreign -- when their meditations carry them skyward in enclose bubbles, it's breathtaking. The one complaint is that the spell is broken slightly by the dispassionate and largely unnecessary narration of the lead character, reflecting on events after the fact, which tends to distance us from the bizarre immediacy of the story. Fantastic Planet is showing us so much, it doesn't need to tell us anything. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide