Made in 1973, ‘La planète sauvage‘ (or, in its English distribution, ‘The Fantastic Planet‘) is a very interesting milestone in the history of adult animation and, at the same time, of science fiction films. The film is the result of a rather unusual collaboration between René Laloux (for him, the first full-length animated film for adults in a career that included four such films), Roland Topor (Holocaust survivor as a child and late surrealist graphic artist) and the Czechoslovak animation studios, famous in those decades for the quality and artistic and political audacity of the films they made. Production began in the mid-1960s and lasted about ten years, being interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and resumed and completed a few years later. The result is an original, visually powerful film with messages that can be interpreted on multiple levels, reflecting the complexity of the metaphors that can be extracted from the narrative inspired by a novel by Stefan Wul but also the constraints of the era in which it was created and released on screens.
The story takes place on a distant planet, sometime in the future. The human species is not dominant there. On the contrary, it is considered an inferior species, belonging to the animal reign, good to be hunted and victim of the whims and even periodic decimations by the race of blue-skinned giants who rule the planet. This inverted ratio of forces in the future immediately reminded me of ‘Planet of the Apes’ and I think the similarity is not entirely coincidental. Stefan Wul‘s novel appeared in 1958, while the book ‘Planet of the Apes’, which became more famous together with its author Pierre Boulle thanks to the Hollywood film adaptations, appeared in 1963, the year in which the decade of preparations and production for ‘La planète sauvage‘ began. By the time Laloux‘s film was completed, ‘Planet of the Apes’ had had time to become a blockbuster. Both books belong to the same French science fiction trend of the 1950s and 1960s, which included many references to current events at the time (the Cold War, the balance of nuclear terror) and dystopian visions of the future. The hero of the animated film is a kind of Mowgli raised as a child in the society of the giants, whom he knows and learns their morals and technology, later using them to initiate a resistance and revolt movement against the unjust order. The conflict between the two species can be interpreted and has been interpreted in different ways. In the context of the 1960s and 1970s and considering the partnership with the Czechoslovak studios, the oppressed species would symbolize the nations of Eastern Europe, then captive to the dictatorships imposed by Soviet tanks. Animal protectionists have also interpreted the story as a warning and a protest against the destruction that contemporary policies bring to the terrestrial ecosystem. I would also add the historical element, perhaps at the more abstract level of protest against any form of genocide, but also specifically with reference to the tragedy of the Holocaust, related to the biography of Roland Topor.
The film looks formidable from a visual point of view. Roland Topor (whose life would be a good subject for a film) created a fantastic world, with a surreal fauna and its laws, sometimes full of cruelty, which seems to precede what George Lucas would begin to do a few years later in ‘Star Wars’. Lucas never mentioned European sci-fi films in general or Topor‘s films in particular as sources of inspiration, but we can assume that he saw them. Maybe someone will ask him, sometime. The Czechoslovak studios used a technique called ‘cutout animation’ whose results look very different from what Disney studios were doing at the time using analog techniques and what is done today with digital methods. The effect is relatively static compared to the continuous dynamics that viewers of contemporary animation are used to, but it gives the eyes and mind time to get used to the strange and fascinating forms created by Roland Topor. The weak point of the film is, in my opinion, the narrative. Seen today, the story seems annoyingly simplistic and linear. The censorship interventions (including self-censorship), necessary for the film to be finished in communist Czechoslovakia and then seen by viewers, may also to blame. Sci-fi and fantasy art fans, however, have every reason to search for and watch ‘La planète sauvage‘.