fantastic planet 106

Fantastic planet (1973)

Director: Rene Laloux
Country: France
An adaptation of Om en Serie (Oms in series) by Stefan Wul

Fantastic planet takes place on an alien planet where humans (oms) are kept as pets by the Draag, giant blue aliens. The story follows the life of a male om called Terr, who after spending much of his childhood as a Draag pet, runs away with a set of Draag educational headphones. He then joins a group of feral Om, who live in an abandoned park. When the park is fumigated by the Draag to get rid of the Om pests, Terr and a few of the remaining Om retaliate by killing a Draag and relocate to a abandoned rocket dump. Using the knowledge gained from the educational headphones, the Oms build a rocket and fly to the planet's uninhabited moon. Upon landing, the Oms find out that the Draags have been using the moon as the location for alien bootycalls, which they promptly disrupt. The Draags find out about the extent of the Oms intelligence, agree to a peace treaty with the Oms and the Oms get an artificial moon on which they can live.

The film presents themes of animal cruelty, where the story is told from the perspective of a pet human and the treatment of Oms by the Draag is a reflection of the various ways humans treat animals. An example of this is shown near the beginning of the film where Terr's mother is killed by a group of Draag children when they play too rough. Another example is when the Draag fumigate the Om-infested park, similar to how a house is fumigated to get rid of termites.


I thought the film was a fairly enjoyable watch. My main criticism is the audio quality (which seems to be a recurring theme in my reviews of old movies), where loud noises are either piercing, deafening or some combination of the two. It is clear that a lot of thought went into the worldbuilding elements, such as the planets history and the culture of the Oms and Draags. One potential criticism is that many of these elements are shown with no clear reason as to why they exist in the first place and have little to no relevance to the plot, although one could argue that the nonsensical nature of these scenes is the point: the Oms are on an alien planet, the rules of Earth don't apply. Another potential criticism is that there are scenes of full frontal nudity (which is okay-ish with within reason), which are largely exclusive to the female characters (which is not). Any scenes with male nudity are either done for a joke or a costume chance, where many of the scenes with female nudity has been done to titillate. Alien planet or not, the creators (of both the book and the movie) and the audience are humans with all our societal biases and these elements reflect poorly on the film.