Rene Laloux and his Snails

I spoke of a collection of old-timey cartoons that Corrie had purchased for a couple of bucks. Tucked into the vast array of banal and/or stupid animated shorts was something called "Les Escargots", French for "The Snails".

Seeing the name, even, in the middle of a list with old Popeye and Betty Boop entries made me curious. When we got around to watching it, we marveled at what we saw: a stylish artsy animated short from some French New Wave animators Rene Laloux and Roland Topor from 1965. It's similar to early South Park episodes in it's use of moving cutouts, but here the cutouts are French impressionistic paintings.

The story is odd, with a farmer who can't grow anything. This farmer is lamenting his situation, starts crying, and his tears make the crops grow to ridiculous size. The farmer is happy, but giant snails come and ravage his crops. After wreaking havoc, the snails are gone and he's alone with his barren farmland. Again his tears produce extra large vegetables, but this time it's carrots, and the short ends with a giant rabbit making a quick appearance.

I looked up Rene Laloux and Roland Topor, and their collaboration produced two shorts and a feature length animated film, "The Wild Planet":




Translated usually as "Fantastic Planet", the story is about an alien race, Draags, that are relative giants to the human-like Oms (a French play on the word hommes, "men"), who are pets for the Draag species. It is based on a French sci-fi novel Oms en serie written by Stefan Wul and published in 1957.

The animation style and storytelling from these two French collaborators is wild enough to inspire me to search out this film. If I find it, and it's reasonable to purchase, I'll let my few loyal readers know all bout it.