Fantastic Planet

Hey, the first movie of the Wellington Film Society I got to this year. I'm not sure why this is called Fantastic Planet when the French title is clearly "The Savage Planet".

The Draags are blue aliens, and keep the tiny Oms as pets. Oms are small humanoids they gathered from various planets, eg from Terra. (Ie, humans.) One Om pet gets his learning on, then escapes to join other wild Oms, which Draags consider vermin. But after one eradication too many, the Oms manage to get away and luck into getting their hands on technology, and then we'll see who rules this savage planet.

This is a French animated cartoon and it is weird AF. There are lots of strange plants and creatures, and a lot of this movie is "hey, check out this weird thing we came up with!" (In one case, it doesn't even bother with the pretense of following the Oms moving around to cut to a weird animal interaction.) Often I had only the barest idea what was going on. Not to say this is a complex story, just that it involves so many random moments you can easily lose track of what you are supposed to take in.

Although given that this is little creatures trying to get away to a place of their own in a bigger world, I kept flashing back to Watership Down.

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