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Fantastic Planet      Reviewer: Ben Miler | See all reviews by Ben Miler Section: Reviews | Category: Movie | Area: Oregon | Topic: The Arts
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Fantastic Planet is one of the most unusual sci-fi films I have ever seen. It's a sci-fi animated dealing with blue-skinned giants known as the Traags, who keep Oms, which are descendants of Earthlings who left their planet after its destruction, as pets.
One Om, named Terr was kept as a pet by a Traag named Tiwa. After Tiwa got bored with Terr, Terr ran away with a Traag learning device in to the woods, home to "savage Oms". Terr started teaching the "savage Oms" with the learning device, in which they stage a revolt against the Traags.
What makes this movie really special is the bizarre, otherworldy, surrealistic scenes. You get treated with all sorts of strange alien creatures and scenes that look like nothing here on Earth. Music, by far and large, consists of bizarre, 1970s futuristic funk music with strange electronic effects, done by a Frenchman named Alain Goraguer.
My favorite scenes are the ones where the Traags are meditating, and they project these odd spheres. Another is a room where four Traags are meditating and they transform their bodies to look like autumn leaves. The film was originally made in Czechoslovakia, when the country was still communist, but then the communists did not like the theme of the film (which could have meant a metaphor of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or simply a metaphor of revolting against communism), so they finished production in France. Lots of socio-political overtones are found in this film throughout. The production is as far from that slick Hollywood nonsense as you can get. It's as far removed from the pathetic excuses of sci-fi these days as you get. This is what sci-fi was all about before Star Wars came around and lowered the quality of sci-fi immensely. The animation, while not sophisticated, or elaborate, is still very mindblowing. Fantastic Planet was aired at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, and was the winner there! But this is truly one bizarre and trippy film, and I very highly recommend it.
More Info Directed by: Rene Laloux Original French title: La Plančte Sauvage Available on VHS and DVD, both in French with English subtitles, or dubbed in English.
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Visitor Comments about Fantastic Planet
Posted by MV on 2005-10-06 06:37:23 My Score:  
Comment: Hey Ho
What can one say but I''ve got the merc''s again so PJ has to make Fantastics II.
What''s the blocks for???????!!!. My mum''s jewlery box has been stolen and I''ve been throwing up each morning.
Thanks for the memories.
MV
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Posted by Ben Miler on 2003-06-08 12:17:31 My Score:
Comment: I have watched three different VHS editions. The first I bought was the dubbed in English version by Anchor Bay. While itself being fine, movie-wise, and it''s in the original widescreen format, they forgot to remove the subtitles. But then my VCR gobbled the tape one day and I had to throw it away. I went and bought the earlier edition on Uniter American Video Corp. It too was dubbed in English, but it wasn''t widescreen. The advantage here was there were no subtitles. But the picture quality wasn''t that great (too faded in certain spots, too bright in others). Plus a couple of the scenes were missing (like where Tiva decides what to name her pet Om, where she says, "I think I''ll name her Tiva just like me", although the part where she names her pet Om "Terr" is still intact, and this other scene that''s right after the scene where Terr carries the Traag learning device by this creature in the cage that laughs and captures flying creatures, the one with this strange creature on long legs and several eyes, was missing on this early edition). I quickly went and bought the French language (w/subtitles) version of this film on VHS, on Anchor Bay. This, for VHS owners, is the one to get. I found the voices a lot more appealing than the annoying Americanized voices in the dubbed in English version. The child Traags do actually sound like children (rather than an adult woman trying to sounds like a kid). The teenaged Terr (after he ran away from Terr with the Traag learning device) sounds actually like an adolescent. Plus you get the American trailer for the film, and three art films shorts from René Laloux, same guy who made Fantastic Planet possile. One is Les Dents du Singe (Monkey''s Teeth) (1960), Les Temps Mort (The Dead Times) (1964), and Les Escargots (The Snails) (1965). These three short clips are the only films that René Laloux had done prior to Fantastic Planet. These are basically plotless, although, most don''t think so, I think Monkey''s Teeth is the best of the three (because it was silly, and the animation is really crude, looks like it was done by elementary school kids, but at least is more colorful and more detailed than South Park, it still looks like it was drawn by a bunch of 10 year olds - plus I like the avant garde jazzy score to it, which is really trippy, and you got to bear in mind this was 1960, when the rock scene was anything but trippy, and still writing songs about teen romance).
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