And I’m posting it to my blog!

Since I won’t be blogging for a few days on account of being near a beach, I present Fantastic Planet, or La Planète Sauvage, a 1973 animated film by French animator René Laloux. The trailer is at left, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing. It is, simply stated, a mindfuck (via Wikipedia):

The film depicts a future in which human beings, known as “Oms” (a homonym of the French-language word hommes, meaning men), are creatures on the Draags’ home planet, where they are seen as pests and sometimes kept as pets (with collars). The Draags are an alien species which is humanoid in shape but a hundred times larger than humans, with blue skin, fan-like earlobes and huge, protruding red eyes. The Draags also live much longer than human beings – one Draag week equals a human year. Some Oms are domesticated as pets, but others run wild, and are periodically exterminated. The Draags’ treatment of the Oms is ironically contrasted with their high level of technological and spiritual development.

The movie is pretty damn dark. It opens with a group of Draag children (who are around 50 feet tall) toying with a human female and her baby. Eventually, one of them picks up the woman and drops her to her death. One of the children keeps the human baby as a pet, and, well, you can see where this is going. It’s fair, in my opinion, to call this a science fiction masterpiece, in its own strange way.

(Alternate English and French versions on YouTube.)