Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux's Fantastic Planet arrives from 1973 with its blue giants and its tiny humans and its strange, drifting score, and it has been asking the same uncomfortable question for fifty years. On Ygam, the Draags keep Oms as pets, collar them, slaughter them when the population grows inconvenient, and think nothing of it. The film does not whisper this parallel. It shouts it through the architecture. Critics have long read the Draag and Om arrangement as a role reversal aimed at racism, apartheid, and the industrialized murder of the Holocaust, and the reading holds up. Roland Topor, who designed the thing, had a father who sat in a Vichy camp, which lends the whole enterprise a certain biographical weight.

The allegory is broad enough to be multipurpose, which is both its strength and its limitation. It gestures at oppression in general, at animal rights, at the way power decides who counts as a person, but it stops short of any sustained critique of capital or class. The politics are species politics. A wild female Om cuts Terr's collar and brings him to her tribe, and Tiwa, the Draag girl, is a real presence in the story, though the film advances no particular thesis about women. It simply has them.

What the film does not do is lecture in the modern manner. There is no dialogue explaining the audience's complicity, no checklist of contemporary virtues, no casting decisions made to satisfy a spreadsheet. It has no interest in climate, in body image, in neurodiversity. It is an old, strange, gorgeous object, and its moral seriousness belongs to an earlier era, when a parable could be brutal and wordless and still land.

That is the whole of it. A film can be savage and humane without being fashionable, and this one has been sitting on its moon for half a century, waiting for us to catch up to its cruelty. We have not, but the animation is lovely regardless. I score it accordingly, with the grim satisfaction of a man who has now watched it four times and expects to watch it again.

In sum, the picture is an allegory first and a sermon never, which is precisely why it still stings. The Draags do not explain themselves, and neither does the film. There is no closing card instructing us how to feel, no montage of real-world footage to underline the point. Just the collar, the headset, the purge, and the strange statues on the moon. It trusts us to draw the line from Ygam to here. That trust is rarer now than it was in 1973, and it is the reason the thing endures while louder, more earnest animations have faded from memory. Recommended, with reservations about the pacing and none about the politics.

Final verdict: a sober, alien, and quietly furious piece of work, best viewed late at night and without company. It earns its reputation. It does not earn a lecture, because it never gives one. That, in the end, is the highest compliment available in this line of work, and I offer it without hesitation, and without any further ceremony, to a film that has waited long enough for the recognition it deserves, and which will presumably outlast us all, sitting up there on its moon, patient, blue, and unimpressed.

So it goes. Another classification completed, another evening spent in the company of giants who think we are vermin. The job has its rewards, few of them, and this is one. I will file the paperwork and move on to the next title, which I am told involves a talking car. The sacred duty continues. Someone has to do it, and it will not be the Draags, who have better things to contemplate, and who would not lower themselves to the task even if asked politely, which they never are, because nobody asks giants for favors.

The end, or near enough. Good night.

It should be noted that the film was adapted from Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en série, and the source material carries much of the same bleak symmetry. The Czech and French studios that animated it have long since dissolved or transformed, which gives the whole affair the texture of an artifact recovered from a vanished civilization. That is fitting. The film is about the view from below, and it was made by people who understood that view intimately. It does not need our approval. It has our attention, which is more than most films ever earn, and more than most deserve, and certainly more than I have left to give tonight, having spent the better part of it watching tiny people run from enormous shadows.

I am tired. The score is what it is. The film is what it is. We are all, in the end, someone else's pet, and the moon is very far away, and the statues are waiting, and nobody is coming to cut the collar off.

That is the review.