Cloaked Critic Reviews Fantastic Planet

!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!

"Fantastic Planet" (also known by its French title, "La Planete Sauvage"; which literally translates to "The Savage Planet") is a super trippy cutout stop-motion animated film by Rene Laloux and Roland Topor. The story of the film is based on a novel called "Oms en Serie which was written by French writer, Stefan Wul.

As I already mentioned, this movie is pretty damn trippy...which makes sense since it was made during the 70's when everybody was on some kind of psychedelic acid trip. The story takes place in the future on a strange and distant planet inhabited by a giant race of aliens known as the Draags who keep humans, which they call Oms, as pets (how humans got from Earth to the Draag homeworld is never explained). Apart from the fact that this film isn't all too entertaining to my personal tastes, the one major thing I do like is the very intense allegorical theme of role reversal where human beings are viewed as simple mindless animals and treated as either pets or pests by the Draags. The story follows the exploits of Terr, who might as well be called Jesus or Skywalker for all the strong messiah symbolism which is attributed to him. With his mother having been killed by mischievous Draag children, Terr is then adopted by a young female Draag named Tiva who's father also happens to be Master Sinh (presumably the leader of the Draags; though his exact level of authority is never made clear). Terr grows up maturing into adulthood before Tiva, as a year to a human is apparently equivocal to a mere week to a Draag. As he matures he watches his Draag masters and steals knowledge from Tiva's earphones which apparently act like a computer and internet in the form of a earphone headset. One day Terr escapes from his masters and steals Tiva's earphones in the process. The rest of the film is about Terr joining up with the wild Oms and sharing the knowledge of the Draags with them leading to them evolving from mere superstitious cavemen into a sophisticated race of scientifically advanced people bent on leaving the Draag homeworld on rocket ships and colonizing the "Fantastic Planet" which is apparently like a moon that orbits the Draag homeworld and plays a crucial part in the Draags trippy meditation practices.

The animation for this movie reminds me quite a bit of the animated sequences from Monty Python, which is one of the few things I actually find appealing about this story despite the fact that the overall story and characters are about as interesting and compelling as watching an ice cube melt in a luke warm skillet. It also has some pretty good background music too which further helps to compensate for the bland story and characters. All and all this movie is a great cultural and artistic piece of work with some very deep symbolism and eye-popping surreal animation, but certainly not for those who are looking to be entertained by non-stop action/adventure or side-splitting laughter.