I’d been looking forward to HBO Max since the announcement it was coming. Disney+ is fine, but it’s clearly aimed at a more family-friendly audience. Warner Brothers may be the one studio with a library to rival Disney, and it could easily be a more adult friendly service given what WB can pull from its own library.. Sure, there’s kids stuff in there too, but it won’t be limited to that.
Anyway, the service is up now, and I’m rather pleased with the options for movies. Not only is there the stuff I knew would be there, a deep dive into the WB’s library, but also stuff from Studio Ghibli and the Criterion Collection. As such, when the only real problem is I can’t watch it on my TV due to disputes between the streaming company I use and WB, I opted to give it a whirl with the 1973 animated French movie Fantastic Planet.
Set in what appears to be an unknown number of years in the future, when humans, now known as Oms, are little better than vermin or pets to the giant Draags, blue-skinned giants who live to meditate for reasons that are only revealed at the end of the movie. We see the Oms live in a stone-age level existence, but some history suggests they came to the planet after something big hit the Earth. Draags live longer, but Om reproduce much more often. As it is, the Draag don’t think much of the Om. Young Draag keep some as pets. Most are treated like vermin that are occasionally exterminated.
Into this, a young Draag girl named Tiwa adopts an orphaned Om boy she names Terr. Though Terr is collared and kept on a short leash, he does have some advantage other Oms lack: he manages to gain access to a Draag learning device, picking up on their reading, writing, and technology. After escaping from Tiwa’s home, Terr meets some wild Oms and teaches them how to survive on a planet where the giant inhabitants look on them as little better than bugs. And Terr’s knowledge makes the Om a lot more dangerous to the Draag. Can these two races learn to live in peace or will they wipe each other out?
This movie was a visual delight. While the animation may not have been the best in terms of overall movement of characters, the art style for it and the creative ways in which the movie made the alien planet look alien worked very well. The Om here don’t remember a time before the Draag, and the Draag don’t see them as anything other than simple animals. They can’t and possibly won’t communicate with each other, and indeed the opening scene shows how Terr became an orphan when a couple Draag kids “play” with his mother until she dies. This is not a kid’s cartoon!
Indeed, it’s a series of visual treats, where alien animals and plants appear, allowing the viewer to step away from the plot for a minute and to just admire the visual oddities the animators came up with. Combine that with a story that asks what if humans were the ants to another species, and you have an intriguing animated feature that works not just as a good story, but as a visual feast for the eyes.
Grade: A-
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