Based on the 1958 novel Oms en série by French science fiction writer Pierre Pairault (writing under the name Stefan Wul), the film takes place on a distant planet called Ygam that is home to the Draags, enormous blue humanoid with round red eyes and fin-like ears, and Oms, which for all intents and purposes look and behave like ordinary human beings (the name is purposeful play on the French word for men, hommes, which phonetically sounds exactly the same). The Oms are the pets, playthings, and victims of the Draags, who think nothing of killing them even though they are also capable of treating them with sentimental affection. In other words, the Draags treat the Oms exactly the way we tend to treat all the other creatures on Earth: at our discretion. This means that the Draags aren’t one-dimensional villains or monsters, but rather reflections of our very human nature, or at least the part of our nature that blindly sees ourselves as superior and therefore thinks nothing of the suffering of other creatures if it benefits us.

The protagonist of the story is Terr (Jean Valmont), an Om who is kept as a pet by a young Draag named Tiwa (Jennifer Drake), the daughter of an important leader named Master Sinh, who adopts him after his mother is accidentally killed by some of her friends while playing (“She’s stopped moving. Now we can’t play with her anymore” are the film’s blandly chilling opening lines). Terr grows up as Tiwa’s pet, and his worldview is profoundly altered by his being able to listen in to the telepathic education she receives via a large set of headphones, which essential equips him with Draag language and scientific knowledge that all other Oms lack. That makes him invaluable to the wild Oms who live free in an abandoned park and are plotting a revolt against the Draags, which necessarily requires the development of technologies to protect themselves and to kill the Draags, who frequently engage in a process of “de-Omization” to cull the Oms’ numbers.

The allegorical implications of Fantastic Planet are quite obvious, even as the specific correlations are vague enough to open it up to a number of different readings. The clearest message is against thoughtless violence, as the Draags’ casually cruel treatment of the Oms contrasts directly with their advanced technology and their apparent spiritual capacities, which we see in their daily meditation sessions that, as revealed in the film’s final moments, are much more than just achieving inner peace. The Draags are capable of logic and reason and emotion, yet because they view the Oms as fundamentally inferior (their physically diminutive size being the primary signifier), they feel nothing in mistreating them. The violence inflicted on the Oms is frequently horrifying, especially when the Draags engage in what appears to be full-on genocide near the end of the film, yet they do nothing that we do not do, as well (the human tendency toward violence and self-destruction had been the subject of Laloux and Topor’s first collaboration, the fascinatingly ghastly 1965 short film Les temps morts). Like all meaningful science fiction, Fantastic Planet uses a fantastical scenario to make us look at ourselves and question our own ways and—hopefully—strive to be better.

The film’s philosophical and literary aspirations, as well as its visual surrealism, are thoroughly grounded in its aesthetic, which relies on a highly stylized form of cut-out animation (wherein paper cut-outs are animated in stop-motion fashion by hand). Topor’s fantastical character and environmental designs are done in a style that is reminiscent of medieval woodcuts or engravings, with heavy reliance on thousands of hand-drawn lines that provide both intense detail and a sense of aesthetic distance (Laloux describes the style as “quite Rabelaisian”). Unlike the smooth, lifelike style pioneered by Walt Disney and emulated by so many others, there is no attempt at realism here, but rather a self-conscious sense of pictures being put in motion. At times the images are all but static, while at other times there are multiple elements in motion, albeit always in a way that feels expressly animated. It is somewhat jarring at first, especially for those not used to this style of animation, but it gels so completely with the film’s narrative terrain that any other style would seem ill-suited. The same could be said for the avant-garde jazz score by Alain Goraguer, which is so funky and otherworldly that it surpasses any charges of datedness.

Unfortunately, Fantastic Planet was the only feature-length film to come from the collaboration between Laloux and Topor (“We were made to work together,” Laloux would say later). Laloux had studied painting in school, and he found himself working as an intern at the Clinique psychiatrique de La Borde, where he started experimenting with animation using shadow puppets on rods and paper cut-outs. By the time he met Topor, the latter had already gained some degree of renown and notoriety for co-founding the Panic Movement, an absurdist-surreal art movement named after the god Pan, in 1962 with Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) and the Spanish surrealist Fernando Arrabal. An intriguing multi-hyphenate, Topor worked with Lalous on two animated short films—the aforementioned Les temps morts and Les escargots (1966)—before launching into the ambitious project that would become Fantastic Planet. The likely didn’t realize what an impactful film they were making or that, so many decades later, it would still be an object of cult adoration that has influenced numerous writers and artists. One can only imagine what else Laloux and Topor might have produced had they continued to collaborate, rather than going their separate ways.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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