50 Years Ago: Fantastic Planet (1973)

Fifty years ago, a wondrous animated science fiction film premiered at Cannes. Today, Fantastic Planet still holds up beautifully, a non-franchise, non-sequel picture of great symbolic power and continued relevance.

The story commences on a faraway planet known as Ygam. There, humans are  pets called "Oms," and cared for by giant blue creatures, Draags. One Om named Ter breaks free from captivity, and using his knowledge of Draag domestic life and history, joins up with a band of rebel humans to free his people from their enslavement. Ter’s escape, however, only confirms the Draags’ biases about the tiny (Earth) creatures, and a pogrom of genocide is launched.

Fantastic Planet is filled with amazing visuals of another world. Tiny humans like Ter occupy only the ground level of this world and make their homes and communities wherever they can, amid unearthly flora and fauna. One scene of ritual combat involves the Oms strapping weird lobster creatures to their chests.These as well as other visuals are as imaginative as they are impressive, and the vehicle of animation permits for al sense of scope not possible in live action.

A special point is made in Fantastic Planet of noting that the Oms have no schools and therefore no real freedom or understanding of freedom. As a result, perhaps, of this absence, the Oms are afraid of knowledge and consider it “evil.”  They see it as something that the Draags “own.”  Importantly, the Oms’ journey towards independence in the film comes only when Ter can convince his fellow fighters that knowledge is the answer that will free them. This point is underlined by the finale, which finds the humans taking possession of a rocket, flying to another world, and there unlocking the strange secret of the Draags as well as the secret of their own self-destructive history. This message holds great relevance in 2023, as book banning, and, indeed, book burning is on the rise. An educated populace is a strong populace, but a populace without knowledge, without education, is easily controlled.

Fantastic Planet effectively handles the concept of slavery, or even owning pets, since it makes us consider how we would feel to live at the whim of a thoughtless giant. Masters may not knowingly be cruel, but all creatures – including slaves and pets – possess feelings, and even a right to things we take for granted as absolute, like family.  The first scene in the film is especially terrifying in its depiction of this idea. A mother Om and her baby run from the Draags, but are separated and then used as playthings, ones without destiny, self-determination, or any other rights.  Ter survives. His mother does not.

           

Fantastic Planet is remarkable in its depiction of the aliens. At first, the Draags don’t seem so bad. They simply seem unaware that their little pets, the Oms, are sentient creatures with the right to be free. But as the Oms rebel, the “evolved” Draags behave poorly. They call the Oms  “vermin…that reproduce at an appalling rate” and launch a campaign of genocide against them. Perhaps a comparison to Planet of the Apes is merited here.  In both films, the ruling culture is savage to humanity, but that savagery is, in some fashion, also justified by humanity’s behavior. Would you allow to grow unchecked a population of beings that, on their own world and under their own auspices, destroyed itself?

Fantastic Planet is an involving movie because it asks that question. After a race has destroyed itself, it may not boast the right to be free, or determine its destiny. It may even merit all the cruelty and fear demonstrated by the Oms.  

Of course, the opposite side of the coin is that it is wrong to blame individual living now for the behavior of people that lived generations earlier.  

But can mankind change? Or must he be forced to change? Again, these are not small questions, a full half-century after the release of Fantastic Planet.