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‘Fantastic Planet’: Spellbinding images from the futuristic 1973 masterpiece
08.01.2016
08:32 am
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A movie poster for ‘Fantastic Planet.’
 
I recently saw a 35mm presentation of director René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, his animated adaptation of a 1950s science fiction novel by French writer Stefan Wul titled Oms en Série. When La Planète sauvage (or Fantastic Planet) was released in 1973 initial impressions expressed in reviews attempted to draw comparisons to the Czech opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Wul went on the record to clear up the rumor (as the book had been written a many years prior to the invasion) saying that Fantastic Planet was truly a work of fiction—and not a political dramatization hiding beneath the cloak of a sci-fi premise.
 

A ‘Dragg’ and his ‘Oms.’
 
Working with far-out French illustrator and long-time collaborator the great Roland Topor, Laloux set out to give Wul’s novel an animated life of its own. The two assembled a team of talented illustrators and artists from Czechoslovakia which during the 60s and 70s were well known within the realm of animation in film for their innovation in the art. Though it was not the only film to use “cut-out” animation (a style of animation used in film starting back in the early 1900s) the laborious work of Fantastic Planet’s talented crew was done frame-by-frame without the aid of modern digital technology.

Reminiscent of the surreal creations of Hieronymus Bosch the story tells the tale of the inhabitants of Ygam—a place where giant blue titans called “Draags” toy with humans (or Oms) who have few other options other than to be great pets. The epic triumph of Fantastic Planet would sadly mark the last time Laloux and Topor would work together. Though nothing can quite compare to the glory of seeing Fantastic Planet in 35mm, late last month Criterion released the film on Blu-ray which was mastered from the original 35mm along with a complete restoration of the soundtrack.

Striking images from this timeless film follow.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.01.2016
08:32 am
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The Far Side: Roland Topor’s cheerfully violent illustrations from ‘Les Masochistes’
06.27.2014
09:29 am
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You may have read Richard’s post on René Laloux and Roland Topor’s surrealist animated short,The Snails—a weird little precursor to their most famous collaboration, Fantastic Planet. Like the aliens in Fantastic Planet, the snails are monstrously large, invoking both science fiction and horror—check out The Snails at the end of the post.

Topor’s 1960 book of illustrations Les Masochistes however, is a much more personable tongue-in-cheek kind of psychological intensity. Here are seemingly mundane human beings, engaging in what (at a brief glance) could be a mundane activity, but the sparse drawings show some really cringe-inducing acts of masochism. You smile, then you shudder, then you remember that Torpor wrote the novel, The Tenant, which was later adapted into the final installment of Polanski’s Apartment Series. It all makes sense in the larger Topor canon of discomfort.

They’re like B. Kliban meets Sacher-Masoch, no?
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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06.27.2014
09:29 am
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Before ‘Fantastic Planet’ there was the surrealist short, ‘The Snails’
09.26.2013
01:52 pm
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Marc Campbell’s post yesterday on the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary—he was even more effusive in his praise of the film on the phone—reminded me of something that I wanted to post here:

Before their collaboration on the classic 1973 animated sci-fi feature, Fantastic Planet, René Laloux and Roland Topor made “Les Escargots,” (“The Snails”) an exquisite stop-frame animated short in 1965. (If the Jodorowsky link isn’t clear, in the early 1960s, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Jodorowsky mounted entrail-covered Hermann Nitsch-like theatrical performance art happenings as “the Panic Movement” in Paris.)

Here’s how IMDB describes this little-known mini-masterpiece:

A gardener tries his best to make his salad plants grow. It is only when he cries that his tears finally water the field and the salads grow huge. The incredible size attracts a multitude of snails that quickly become giant too, causing disasters and panic in the nearby city.

I think that about says it all… The film’s message is a bit ambiguous, as you’ll see. “Les Escargots” won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.

Fun facts: Roland Topor wrote the novel of the same title that Roman Polanski’s creepy as fuck psychological thriller, The Tenant was based on and he played the role of “Renfield” in Werner Herzog’s movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
 

 
The year before “Les Escargots,” René Laloux and Roland Topor collaborated on “Les Temps Morts” (“Dead Times”) an anti-war meditation on what it means to be human.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.26.2013
01:52 pm
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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Melodrama Sacramental’


 
In the early 1960s, Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, produced theatrical happenings that were part Grand Guignol, part Theater Of Cruelty and, in the case of splatterfests like Melodrama Sacramental, something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on peyote. Calling themselves the Panic Movement, the three provocateurs attempted to shatter the fourth wall with more than just words and gestures - they were going for something more visceral: blood and guts - anything to close the distance between spectacle and spectator and to wake and alert the audience to the suffering, inequality and untruths engulfing them in this modern world gone mad. Yes, life stinks and so should art. The Panic Movement put the “fart” in artsy fartsy - a steaming turd in the cosmic punchbowl.

Jodorowsky and company’s sacramental melodrama was staged in Paris, May of 1965, the same month and year that the largest Vietnam teach-in was held (May 21–23, 1965) at UC Berkeley, one of the seminal events in the history of the American anti-war movement, the first rumblings of a protest movement against the Vietnam war that would grow to a deafening roar. Was Jodorowsky’s “happening”  also a a mirroring of the savagery of war and a metaphor for the lives being sacrificed in Vietnam? Were the prophets of peace in synch and sending signals to each other from two epicenters of radical change?

In Melodrama Sacramental we see images that would be repeated in Jodorowsky’s epic mindfucker El Topo, another nightmare ode to man’s inhumanity to man.

On the soundtrack we hear Allen Ginsberg reading from his poem “Lysergic Acid,” written in San Francisco in 1959.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.01.2012
08:53 pm
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