February 4, 2021
Fantastic Planet (1973) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard
Though this is Disney month, my only goal is to watch Disney films on half of the days, giving myself a little leeway in case anything interesting pops up, and today something interesting indeed did.
I had planned on either Peter Pan or Melody Time as being the next film watched, but I also do glance at the TCM app every day to see if there’s anything to put on my watchlist, and when I looked at it, there it was, Fantastic Planet, and why wait? As I said on Facebook, when the opportunity arises to watch Fantastic Planet, you grab it with both hands.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t entirely certain as to whether I’d seen it before. I knew I had seen some crazy ’70s animation when I was a kid at FilmEx, and of course the images of the film were very familiar to me, but I wasn’t quite sure. Now, having watched it, I can pretty safely say that I had never seen it before in full. Mostly because the plot was a complete mystery to me!
It takes place on an alien planet (Ygam) populated by massive blue aliens (Draags) who keep tiny humans (Oms) as pets, like pet mice and rats, and the wild Oms determination to get away from the Draags to the Wild Planet, which is the moon of Ygam. I never knew that the Fantastic Planet of the title is not Ygam, which is extremely fantastic, but the Wild Planet, as that is what the French title, La Planète Sauvage, means.
The plot is more interesting than it needs to be, as the images are just everything. It’s not only alien, it’s French, so it’s even more alien to Americans. That’s not a joke, actually.
The POV of the film is from the Oms, but it’s not difficult to see things from the Draags viewpoint, as they are more us than the Oms are. If your pet mouse seemed to want to attend Zoom school with you, then actually ran away, stealing your Chromebook, would you immediately think that the mice had the same intelligence as humans? Probably not! So it’s not that the Draags were being any crueller trying to stamp out the wild Oms than we think of ourselves as when we call in the exterminator to do something about this rodent problem.
It is a fascinating and compelling movie, well worth seeking out. Not for kids, though.
365 Films in 365 Days 