Summary
On a distant world, human like creatures, fed up with their animal like lives, rebel against their gigantic blue alien masters.
Unexplained Images
I don’t remember the first time I saw the artwork of this film. The image of a large blue alien face, examining a small human held in the palm of a large blue hand, feels like an image I saw who I was young. The memory seems that old in my brain. How did that image get in my mind? I don’t remember yet I would have sworn that I had seen this film until, as I scrolled through the Filmstruck catalogue, it occurred to me, I had never even seen it.
I didn’t know how that could be and so I decided to remedy that situation.
Simple Absurdity
"Fantastic Planet” is immediately engaging. The imagery used and animation style arrests your attention and shocks you with it’s alien simplicity and removed point of view. In many ways it feels like a fairy tale or child’s allegory. This construct is the most enjoyable part of the film.
It feels a bit like a story that C.S. Lewis might have written instead of Narnia had he been more of a secularist. The imagery is all very obvious and thinly veiled but rather than seeming to simple and analogy, the primary nature of the imagery is what makes it easy to enjoy and enter into. There is a certain joy that comes with knowing you understand exactly the point the director is making and simply watching it unfold.
It creates a calming feeling in your mind that the film exploits to make its more shocking moments land like inevitable hammers. The shock is not so much that the thing happening is unexpected. It is more like they are shocking because they are seen coming a mile away yet they cannot be stopped.
It is this tension and the feeling that nothing can be done which I found the most interesting. It is mirrored in the immense size of the aliens and their seeming total control over the humanoids. Our helplessness against larger society feels like slavery yet the film finds hope in small moments and encourages us to do the same as the humanoids find voices to resist.
Verdict
I’m not going to sit here and say “Fantastic Planet” is a terribly important film or that it is saying anything especially profound, but the voice it is using, the imagery and animation, is delightful and engaging, making what might have been, in a different world, a child’s picture book, into a delightfully adult presentation of simple philosophy and observation.
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