French movie poster.
Source: Wikipedia.
Fantastic Planet (1973; French: La Planète Sauvage) looks like something the Monty Python troupe might have created: an animated tale of humans taking the role of pets to their gigantic overlords, the Draags on the Draag home planet. The human orphan infant Terr, adopted by Draag child Tiwa, manages to survive to his teen years, and, more importantly, learns to listen in on the psychic school lessons delivered to Tiwa.
He escapes to find ‘wild’ Oms, or humans, surviving on the leavings of the Draags, It’s a rough world, but Terr is ready for it, and his knowledge is unique among the humans. His learning keeps the humans alive, no doubt a theme, as the Draags, irritated at the activities of a clearly inferior race, including having babies much more quickly than the Draags, and discovering the murder of a Draag by the humans, determine to be rid of the humans. Then it’s a race against to get off the planet.
The ending is sufficiently loony to be worthy of this sort of movie, and seemed nearly incoherent.
And it’s a lot like Monty Python’s animated bits, with no attention paid to plausibility in the midst of all the apparent whimsy, and some awfully horrible animal behaviors best not described. The animation itself fascinated my Arts Editor, ranging from sketchy, but recognizable, half-naked figures, to simple stick figures at the human massacre.
I’m not sure about enjoying this story, but it does force the audience to pay attention and do a bit of thinking. Which is more than a lot of movies today. Tellingly, we were both sure we wouldn’t make it to the end, but, despite some snarky remarks on our part, we saw it right to what we believe was the end; the print we viewed came to a very abrupt end.
