2023 Movie Challenge Week 17 Recap

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I can’t believe we are about 1/3 of the way through this challenge already. I don’t know about you, but I am so glad I have been given the push to watch some of the films on my list this year, especially the ones I’ve been putting off for a while.

This week we are watching an Animated Film and this was the first time in the challenge that I watched something I had already seen. Granted, I only watched this film for the first time back in January, but I had to watch it a second time in preparation for writing this post to refresh my memory on it. The film in question is the 1973 surrealist science fiction film, Fantastic Planet. The original French title is La planète sauvage which more accurately translates to The Wild Planet, which I actually prefer.

I originally watched this on a recommendation from someone in a movie roulette group I’m in on Discord. Each week we get a category from the organizer along with a randomized member to give a recommendation to in that category. We then also recommend a movie to someone else, watch our recommended film, and provide a rating. The idea is to watch films you’ve never seen and expand your horizons in film watching. I’m in two of these groups and several of the films I’ve watched from these recommendations have been fantastic. Unfortunately, there are some duds as well, but that’s all part of the fun.

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When I first watched Fantastic Planet, I wasn’t terribly fond of it. If you check back to the review I wrote at the time, I gave it a 6 out of 10, or three stars (out of five). I could tell there was something there, but I wasn’t quite getting it yet. You can go back and read my review of the film from January to get my initial thoughts, but I’m going to expand on them a bit here in light of my recent second viewing.

​​My main complaint in the first viewing was the lack of a strong story, and while there is still plenty more that the film could have done in terms of story, I think I was a bit harsh on it initially. The story is intentionally simple so that the messaging of rising up against oppression, the power of knowledge, and trying to have concern for our fellow beings can be expressed in the action. That said, I still feel a bit like the allegory is a bit heavy-handed and could have been disguised a bit better.

One of the things that probably contributed to a more favorable viewing of the film this time around was the quality of the video. When I first got the recommendation, someone provided a link to watch the film online through a (probably illegitimate) bootleg streaming version. This time around, I took the time to track down a copy of the Criterion DVD from my local library, and the quality was so much better, it improved my overall opinion of the film. This goes to show how important it is to watch a film in the best possible environment you can. I wish I had been able to go a step further and watch this in a dark theater without the distraction of my phone and a group of like-minded film fans to share the experience with.
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In addition to the improved film quality on this viewing, I also had access to supporting materials. Two of these were previous animated short films from Laloux titled “Les Temps Morts” (“The Dead Times”) and “Les Escargots” (“The Snails”). These two shorts were quite good, and after watching them I realized something I had felt on my first viewing of Fantastic Planet, but was unable to articulate. Fantastic Planet felt too long by almost half, almost as if the story was intended to be a short film, but was stretched into a feature for whatever reason. Both “Les Temps Morts” and “Les Escargots” worked well because they were succinct in their presentation, their brevity making them superior to Fantastic Planet in my estimation.

The other piece of bonus information I got in viewing the film on physical media was an insert in the package that had the text of an essay about the film written by Michael Brooke. The essay “Fantastic Planet: Gambous Amalga” provided additional insight into the creation of the film and is still available to read on the Criterion website. When I first watched the film, I wrote that the simple animation helped me focus on the story, but what I hadn’t realized at the time was the actual method of animation used. As Brooke notes in his essay:

“the film’s real strengths lie in Topor’s bizarre designs and the way that character designer Josef Kábrt, background designer Josef Váňa, and their animators brought them uncannily to life by the simple but very effective method of combining paper cutouts and in-camera dissolves, the better to preserve Topor’s characteristic crosshatched drawing style while keeping the budget as low as possible.”

The giant blue Draag Tiwa stares down at her pet Om, Terr.

Understanding that the images we see on the screen are actually little pieces of paper drawings that have been cut out and then manipulated to give the illusion of motion only increases my appreciation of the technical abilities put into the film. At the same time, it also frustrates me that much more that such a cool method of animation was used when the story could have been even stronger.

The last thing I have to mention might seem a little prudish, but it annoyed me even more in my second viewing than it did the first. Throughout the film, the characters, specifically the females, show more skin than we would ever seen in a traditional American animated film. The alien Draags wear outfits that seem like they intentionally highlight the breasts and nipples of the females, and the Om (human) females mostly wear loose garments that expose their breasts in many scenes. After watching the Laloux’s short films noted above, I can tell that this is not unique to Fantastic Planet, but something we see throughout his work.​

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An example of the fantastic creatures that populate the world of Fantastic Planet.

​Now, I don’t have a problem with seeing those things on screen, and there are plenty of films out there with female (and male) private parts on full view, but this film almost seemed to include them just for the shock value of including them. Brooke writes in the aforementioned essay that “film is perfectly suitable for children, who’ll most likely be equally unfazed by that and the Oms’ casual nudity: it’s parents who’ll be squirming uneasily in their seats,” but I would politely disagree. It’s actually not the Om nudity that gets me as that’s more natural. It’s the Draag nudity and the fact that we often get closeups of the young Draag Tiwa holding her Om Terr in her hand, with a very large and prominent nipple in the background. I don’t have a problem with it, but I also don’t think it is necessary and it certainly doesn’t do anything to advance the story. For me, especially watching the film a second time and knowing it was there, it was incredibly distracting.

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​In the end, I’m glad I rewatched this film and gave it another shot. I would increase my overall rating for the film from the 6 I gave it in January to a 7. After watching some of Laloux’s other work and reading a bit more about him and the film, I am interested to see some of his other work. If you’re looking for a surrealist escape from reality, especially one that might be enhanced by watching in a chemically altered state, this is one to consider.