Rene Laloux and his Draags and Oms

Last month I had a post about Rene Laloux and an animated short that he and Roland Topor produced called "Le Escargots". I said that it was a visually beautiful animated thing that was made in a similar way to early South Park episodes: using stop-motion animation with paper cutouts.

Laloux has said that he was willing to sacrifice the smoothness of the animation if the pieces of painted cutouts were beautiful enough, and in that I can say he was successful.

He was given the go ahead at some point later to work with Topor again, but this time on a longer feature, specifically a feature length animated film. The result, "Fantastic Planet", is, while starkly beautiful and moving, obviously the afterbirth of a concoction of LSD and anti-Soviet activism.

Topor planned almost every shot and helped Laloux with each character design in a work of exhaustion that led to the two never working together so closely again. The animation team was started and stopped a few times, mainly because of the USSR invading Czechoslovakia, where they were producing the film, and then the Soviets trying to decide if they were going to allow the production to continue. Eventually the animators just finished the film without waiting for word, risking imprisonment.

One thing I've learned from my lifetime of watching and studying the Simpsons is that the eyes of an animated character are the most expressive facial features of that character. Notice how each Simpson family member has the simplest features of all the show's characters. This simple conceit makes it possible to affect just a single line and change the emotional impact and depth of any scene.

With this knowledge, it was mildly off-putting watching the Draags of "Fantastic Planet", the blue giants. They're the dominant beings on a planet where humans, Oms in the story, have been brought and are considered a nuisance or a pet of the well-to-do. The Draags, as can be seen from the poster I put on the page that I've linked to above, have bright red eyes, and during the course of the film, they never contort to emote in any way. The very first sight in the movie shows an anguished and terrified human mother running and clutching her baby, a scene that shows that Laloux knew full well about the power of eyes and emotions. Watching the Draags for so long is eerie.

While Laloux and Torpor might not have literally been high on acid as they designed the sets and random animals and landscapes, all of those designs probably couldn't have come from artists who were totally unfamiliar with LSD.

I recommend this film, both as a trippy animated piece and as a biting political allegory. If someone acquires it off Amazon.com, beware that it might not play in your DVD player, and you may have to watch it on a computer.