The tables are turned on this savage planet where humans become a victim to their own hubris and prejudice by the hands of giant blue aliens in this eye whirling animation.
Last night I was transported back into the body of my 10-year-old self as I watched Fantastic Planet (1973) and my mind was blown just as much as it was then. No more being the ridiculous child that I was and having some semblance of reason (or so I would love to believe) this film makes perfect sense now besides being a fantasia which tickles the senses with its otherworldly imagery and hypnotic sounds.
Among my favourite animated movies, this little story is about role reversal. Humans on a distant planet called Oms are the domesticated playthings of the giant blue fish-humanoid natives called Draags. The Draags consider the Oms are vermin and inferior so they start to get some funny ideas about their place in the food-chain and begin purging them. When our point of view Om manages to steal some Draag technology and make a break for it, he joins up with some wild Oms in the wilderness and they orchestrate an uprising. Sound familiar? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment.
Anyway, formal elements shall we, because it’s around this paragraph where I begin to jabber on about that. The animation is ugly, but not at all in a negative way, it’s unnerving to put it mildly. If the Oms who are the closest things to humans (physically) in the film constantly have a look of horrified surprise, looking more like seeing a drawing of a human without glasses on – or maybe that’s my eyesight – the alien Draags and their planet is a whole different can of piranha worms. The scribbly drawings and cut-out animations looks out of place and slightly askew but thrown in a world equally so, hence it all works. The next thing I see in the wild Draag landscape is crazier and more intricate than the last, I want to call this stuff nightmarish, a twisted blend between monstrosity and technology and these things scatter their whole planet so no two scenes feel the same. I watched it with my girlfriend last night and she was just as bewildered as I was with the images that attack your corneas with their nature, they resist passage into your brain and your mind questions your eyes what the hell they’re getting involved with. It’s a beautiful ugliness!
Effervescently coupled with the crazed images is a cool and floaty score taking influences from Jazz and psychedelia, the score of this film was responsible for getting me into Jazz music in the first place. The bizarre spacey sounds intruding through twangy ominous guitars and groovy tempos create such a rich soundscape that my ears were revelling in pleasure the whole time. Why don’t I own this score on record yet?
Now time to ramble on about how terrible humans are and what a blight they are on this planet, and my pretext to do so is relevant so good luck trying to reason against this. Tell me the Draags aren’t just humans in disguise, enslaving any and every species that we can subject under our control and intellect, molesting the environment and imposing ourselves onto the scenery – yes, sure we’re doing it in the name for development and furthering our species, we ended up on this planet so might as well make it homely but goddamn there’s better ways of doing it than leaving it in a scrambled mess. The Draag treatment of the Oms seems eerily similar to the way we see wild and domesticated animals so similarities of animal and human rights are quite clear. But wait, it gets worse! The Draags are straight up racist, going on a rampaging genocide and hunting them out of their holes with gas bombs, am I the only one getting Holocaust-y vibes from this? The damn Oms aren’t too great either, they’ve got wild rabid animals they strap to their chests in combat and hurl themselves at one another in duels. In closing, everyone is barbaric and if a species has the same evolutionary attitude as humanity, they’re headed for trouble. It’s a very ‘check yourself before you wreck yourself’ representation of humanity.
Ok, I’ll put a lid on my odium against humanity. This film is a marvellous and weird adventure and a scathing allegory on humanity makes you think about the actions of us as a species and put it into perspective.
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