La Planète Sauvage

Even considering the list of films we’ve played to in Modern Robot — and there have been quite a few — this one may be one of the more dramatic ones we’ve done.

The film is “Fantastic Planet”, although I like its French name better: “La Planète Sauvage”, literally, The Wild Planet.

In the future, human beings are a lesser animals living on the planet of the Traags — creatures enormously larger than humans as well as a society that both keeps humans as pets and exterminate them as pests. The Traag are an educated and advanced culture, whose main purpose is the practice of meditation, communing with each other with psychic powers and escaping the limits of their physical bodies.

The film itself is animated with paper cutout, and drawn in surreal and fantastic style that makes it worth seeing just for the colors, landscapes, and grotesque beasts that inhabit the planet.

“Fantastic Planet” won the Grand Prix du Jury of the Cannes Film Festival when it came out in 1973, and is well worth seeing. Even the trailer is worth seeing, with the most understated voice-over I’ve ever heard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

Show starts about 9pm, and it’s dollar domestics at NYP.