FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘The Monkey’s Teeth,’ French cartoon written by patients in a mental hospital


 
Les dents du singe (The Monkey’s Teeth) is the directorial debut of René Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet and Time Masters. This, his first short, came out of the experimental La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny. As supervisor of artistic activities at La Borde, Laloux staged therapeutic puppet shows with the resident malades mentaux during the years before he gave them their big break in the motion picture business. 

According to his obit in Positif, Laloux and his patients were aided in writing the screenplay for Les dents du singe by Félix Guattari, later the co-author of a number of influential books with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; the group’s screenwriting method was something like a combination of “automatic writing, exquisite corpse, and Jung’s tests.” In 1960, Guattari was working at La Borde as a therapist. He had been drawn to the clinic by its founder, the Lacanian psychiatrist Jean Oury.

The biography Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives conveys a sense of life at La Borde:

Oury baptized his clinic as soon as it opened in April 1953, writing a constitution that he dated Year I (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the French Revolution) and that defined the three guiding principles for this collective therapeutic undertaking. The mangers were protected by democratic centralism, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist ideal that was still popular in the year of Stalin’s death. The second principle reflected the idea of a communist utopia whereby each staff member would alternate between manual labor and intellectual work, which effectively made any status temporary. Tasks were assigned on a rotating basis: everyone in the clinic switched from medical care to housekeeping, from running workshops to preparing theatrical activities. The last principle was antibureaucratic, so things were organized in a communitarian way whereby responsibilities, tasks, and salaries were all shared. Although the term “institutional psychotherapy” had not yet been coined, many of its themes were already in evidence: spatial permeability, freedom of movement, a critique of professional roles and qualifications, institutional flexibility, and the need for a patients’ therapy club.

Hollywood has not yet produced many tales about bike-riding simians meting out justice at the dentist’s office, but I expect we’ll see a “reboot” of The Monkey’s Teeth before long.

 
via Reddit

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
09.27.2018
07:38 am
|
‘Fantastic Planet’: Spellbinding images from the futuristic 1973 masterpiece
08.01.2016
08:32 am
Topics:
Tags:


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…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
|
08.01.2016
08:32 am
|
Before ‘Fantastic Planet’ there was the surrealist short, ‘The Snails’
09.26.2013
01:52 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
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
|
09.26.2013
01:52 pm
|