Fantasia Obscura: The Animated Film That Was Almost ‘Yellow Submarine’s Nemesis
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, a truly fantastic film will come about, despite clashes between the producer and the crew, not to mention the Brezhnev Doctrine…
Fantastic Planet (1973)
(Argos Films; Dir.: Rene Laloux)
When you mention 1968 to a fan of animation, the first thing that comes to mind is usually Yellow Submarine. Released that year, the story of the Beatles’ liberation of Pepperland from the Blue Meanies was a revolution in animation, allowing viewers to consider approaches to the field outside the obvious ones offered by Walt Disney and Warner Brothers.
Had things worked out differently, the film would have had to face direct competition then from La planète sauvage, known here as Fantastic Planet. Based on the novel by SF writer/dentist Stefan Wul, the film was the vision of René Laloux, who was France’s equivalent to George Pal in that he too started his artistic career as a puppeteer before moving into film making.
The film tells the tale of a world inhabited by the Draags, large blue humanoids as tall as buildings and very advanced in their science and psychic discipline. On this planet are the Oms, who we discover soon enough are our descendants, who after Earth fell apart infested the Draags’ spaceships when they came to visit like rats. In fact, humans are to the Draags what rats are to us today, a species that can be domesticated as pets but if allowed to breed in the wild become a nuisance that needs to be culled.
One of the Oms, Terr, orphaned after some young Draags tortured his mother the way children can poke sticks at animals in the back yard, finds by accident that he can learn the Draags’ history and culture through his adoptive mistress’ psychic teaching tool. This gives him knowledge, which allows him to escape and find others of his kind in the wild, where he tries to uplift them and make them better than just savages waiting to be hunted by the grotesque fauna of the world.
Much the same way as George Dunning turned to Heinz Edelmann when it came time to visualize the trip to Pepperland, Laloux engaged the surrealist Roland Topor as his art director, providing a vision of the strange world where humanity came to an ignoble fate. His designs were both eerie and haunting, and manage to have a strong impact despite the somewhat choppy, 2D-animation style the film used to tell the tale.
In terms of the technical production, Laloux faced the hurdle of trying to produce a full length animated film at a time when the French animation industry was not vibrant enough to handle such a challenge. Needing help, the production team turned to a country with a robust animation industry, Czechoslovakia, which was anxious for Western currency and an opportunity to show off their willingness to do business as part of the liberalizations promoted by recently-risen General Secretary Alexander Dubček. The producers probably thought there would be no problems working with the animators in a country on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where their SF artistic sensibilities seemed aligned with their visualizations.
Unfortunately, pre-production ran into serious problems on August 20th of 1968. Much like Yellow Submarine, an occupier came in and forced the people to stop smiling in real life. In fact, there was even an equivalent to the music act Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band from the film, the band Plastic People of the Universe; unfortunately, there were no liberators coming by sub from Liverpool for them, so their efforts to rally the people against the Blue Red Meanies would take a lot longer to produce results.
The end of the Prague Spring, in addition to all the other suffering caused by Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Prague, hampered the animators’ ability to meet their clients need, especially as the post-Dubček era encouraged more realism in Czechoslovak arts. Also, the crew working on the film felt they wanted to do a less allegorical, more in-their-face story of the little people putting it to their oppressors, and nearly walked out on the French altogether, which would have doomed the film.
The fact that the production insured that hard Western currency would come into the country kept everyone at the drawing table, and so production continued, though at a very slow pace. As a result, the film would not be ready for showing until 1973. The wait, however, proved to be worth it, as the film received a special jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, more likely for political reasons than on artistic merit.
While the picture got acclaim in France, the American market was not as embracing. Picked up by Roger Corman for what was likely pennies on the dollar, the film got a somewhat uninspired English language dub that included Barry Bostwick and Cynthia Alder, as well as other talent tied to walk-on TV appearances, then did a brief stint on the midnight movie circuit before being relegated to TV syndication.
At a time before CGI and the end of the Cold War, we ended up with an alternative animated film that challenged the viewers. And despite a counter-revolution led by no less than the USSR, it still ended up being a fairly revolutionary piece.
NEXT TIME: So what happens when a Hollywood Blacklist writer directs his screenplay, and the only folks who really love it are heavy-metal legends…?
