Fantastic Planet (Masters of Cinema) DVD | Movie Mail UK

Star Review

The missing link between the groundbreaking Czech animation of Karel Zeman and Jan Svankmajer and the fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Fantastic Planet (1973) was a French-produced, Czech-made collaboration between animation director René Laloux and the surrealist painter-writer Roland Topor. It's set in a parallel universe in which the giant, technologically advanced Draags hold sway over the tiny, primitive Oms (it's a French film, so that’s ‘hommes’), until a Draag ‘pet’ called Terr accidentally imbibes the knowledge underpinning their civilisation and passes it onto his fellow Oms, who inevitably decide to use it to their advantage. There are any number of allegorical parallels, and memories of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia would have been fresh in the minds of most of the production team, but the film's main strengths lie in Topor's wildly imaginative conceptual designs: this is one of the few sci-fi films with a truly unique look. Masters of Cinema have given it a typically deluxe package, including a new anamorphic transfer, two other Laloux shorts and a 40-page booklet.

Michael Brooke on 11th August 2006

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