René Laloux
Il Pianeta Selvaggio

A woman attempts to flee, holding her child in her arms, from something enormous: we see a hand, blue, that torments, pursues, and grasps her. Within a few minutes, we understand everything: we are on an alien planet, inhabited by enormous blue beings called Draag who use humans as if they were domestic animals, and the initial sequence is nothing more than a depiction of how these beings play with us humans. The rest of the film is the story of Terr, an Om (as the Draag call humans), who manages to learn the knowledge of the blue beings through a device they use to learn information they will never forget, and who will lead the Om's revolt. The underlying idea of the film is to be found within antispeciesism: the human being, unlike what he thinks of himself, is an infinitely small being within the universe.

From the collaboration between Roland Topor, who, in addition to scripting this film, also wrote the novel Le Locataire (which would later become one of Roman Polanski's greatest masterpieces, The Tenant), and René Laloux, in 1973 comes one of the most disturbing animated films ever, Fantastic Planet. Its short duration, less than 70 minutes, passes very slowly and the narrative might be quite challenging; however, if one manages to get into the film's mood and accept the very peculiar style of animation and drawings, it becomes extremely enjoyable and distressing. The drawings are very simple, and the animation is often not very fluid (far from the style of Disney or the future Studio Ghibli), but this stimulates the viewer's eye by disturbing it and increasing the anxiety. It is a two-dimensional animation that favors static over dynamic, and thus the direction is equally simple: the camera never penetrates the space, it is always distant. Often the "camera" is stationary and the few movements are limited to some lateral tracking shots or some zooms. The staging, therefore, is almost theatrical and disorienting.

Exceptionally valid is the soundtrack by jazz musician Alain Goraguer, who composed music that blends progressive and psychedelic rock and free jazz, enhancing the hallucinatory atmosphere that pervades the entire duration of the film.

I hope you will forgive the brief and not too in-depth review of this work, but in my opinion, it is the only possible way to review it: going too deep would mean spoiling the viewing for you.