Surrealism and political critique in the animated medium: Fantastic Planet (1973)
Fig. 1 - Fantastic Planet (René Laloux and Roland Topor, 1973).
The 1973 animated adaptation of Stefan Wul’s 1957 novel, Oms En Serie, recounts the enslavement and subjugation of the ‘Oms,’ (a term that is phonetically indistinguishable from the French word for men, hommes), by giant blue humanoid aliens, the ‘Draags.’ René Laloux and Roland Topor’s French-Czech, surrealist sci-fi classic Fantastic Planet (Fig. 1) was critically acclaimed upon its release, receiving the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. 25 people had been employed for a duration of 4 years to create 1073 pencil drawings in pastel shades, which were then animated using a paper-cut technique. This blog post explores how the film successfully balances the building of a surrealist “Daliesque” world (Thompson, 1973) with powerful political allegory, using its status as an animated fantasy primarily as a potent critique of Soviet aggression.
Fig. 2 - Fantastic Planet.
It is difficult to accurately place the meaning of Fantastic Planet’s message. Where “Laloux has woven a dense tapestry of allegorical resonances” (Bitel, 2006), there exists a diverse range of convincing interpretations regarding its political message. These range from a connection to the story of Exodus, slavery, the Nazi holocaust, to simply a promotion of the countercultural fascination with altered states of consciousness. It seems clear that all interpretations are potentially valid, particularly as animation as a space of metaphor often invites such a variety of interpretations.
Following the Soviet invasion of Prague in the late 1960s, production of Laloux and Topor’s film had to be halted, a move that may have provoked the animators into a more overtly political approach. However, the Soviets were very much aware of the capacity of media to affect culture and subsequent political mentalities, evidenced by the generous budget of their propagandist media outlet in agitprop. As a result, any messages contained in Fantastic Planet had to be expressed with a greater level of caution and covertness. Negotiations between animation studios and state powers were not so uncommon at the time, including in Western Europe and across the US. Yet the surrealist style of Fantastic Planet provided the perfect method of concealment, supported by the rhetorical elements of the animated medium that mean it is able to both dilute and sharpen political content almost simultaneously.
Fig. 3 - Fantastic Planet.
Surrealism as an aesthetic style is inherently political. Topor had recognised the capacity of art “to disrupt social order and generate enthusiasm that can be manipulated for political purposes” (Herhuth, 2018: 169). A well-known member of the avant-garde, Topor co-founded the Panic Movement which, “intended to make surrealism as shocking as it had been in the 1920s” (Brooke, 2016). Just as Un Chien Andalou (Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1929) symbolically expressed its political principles with its slicing open of an eye as a symbol of assault on the bourgeois audience’s gaze, Fantastic Planet too sought to offer an indictment of oppressive institutions (Fig. 3) through its rejection of artistic methods. The film’s use of Surrealism, whilst rejecting “automatism” (Breton, 1955), is ultimately an embrace of many of the movement’s earlier political aims.
Both Laloux and Topor effectively explored the relationship between the Soviet Union and its satellite states through an analogous zoomorphic representation of the ‘Oms.’ This method of exaggeration and attribution of animalistic qualities to humans both concealed the film’s intentions and called upon the sympathies of the audience in reaction to their humiliating subjugation (Fig. 3). The ‘Oms’ in the film certainly experience a limited degree of autonomy. The ‘Draags’ monitor their behaviour, sustain their fates and tantalise them with glimpses of liberty as a means of reinforcing the subordinating relational hierarchy between ‘servant’ and ‘master.’ Such an exaggeration can elicit a greater emotional (and political) response as we may not initially view it as allegorical or a sphere in which we have been desensitised. Although the process of zoomorphism is not uniquely a method of surrealism, it is an otherworldly element of Fantastic Planet that plays a role in building its surrealist environment whilst also counterpointing animation’s own longstanding history of anthropomorphic representation.
Fig. 4 - Fantastic Planet.
During one scene in Fantastic Planet, in a bureaucratic ‘Draag’ council meeting on factory production, one ‘Draag’ declares “unexpectedly our major factories on the ‘Uva of Goham’ have not even come close to obtaining the predicted level of achievement,” which clearly satirises the Soviet leadership (Fig. 4). The threat of ‘Red Terror,’ a series of mass killings carried out by the Bolshevik party following the 1918 civil war in Russia, is also alluded to in Fantastic Planet whereby the ‘Draags’ gas the ‘Oms’ in a systematic programme of ‘De-omisation.’ The use of the term eerily calls upon the tendency of Soviet rulers to use euphemisms in masking abhorrent programs of violent political oppression and repression (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5 - Fantastic Planet.
Fig. 6 - Fantastic Planet.
The film also employs the use of ‘caricature,’ which as Charles Robert Ashbee notes is an “exaggerated representation of the most characteristic features of persons” (1928), in its attempt to affect political mentalities. The animated sequence that begins with Draags’ spirits floating above the sky in red bubbles during meditation (Fig. 6) could be inferred as an exaggerated representation of the Soviet leadership’s self-perception - as intellectual elites exalted above the lesser educated or those they may diagnose with ‘false consciousness.’ Their depiction through fantasy as giant blue humanoids with red eyes presents them as ‘alien’ or ‘foreign,’ to demonise them as an allusion to the banality of evil in Soviet-style bureaucratic despotism. By caricaturising the Soviet leadership, the film simultaneously conceals and elevates its potent political message. Although primarily an indictment of Soviet aggression, Fantastic Planet’s critical exploration is hardly without nuance. The Om protagonist, Terr, heroically mirrors the actions of Lenin in utilising intellectual information stolen from the elite class to lead a successfully actualised rejection of the subordination of the oppressed class. It was not merely a cursory propagandist film in its critical nature.
The Surrealist qualities of Fantastic Planet arguably enabled the film to successfully evade Soviet censorship, while also giving greater potency to the potential of its political affectation to change the minds and actions of the public in any meaningful way. Not only did its absurd exaggerations highlight political oppression, Laloux and Topor also spoke to the relationship between the individual and art through a state of distraction (Benjamin, 1960), with Surrealism as a style apt in “making the viewer forgetful of the medium in order to transform consciousness” (Hopkins, 2004:3). The further removed from any form of recognizable reality we are, the further removed from our political bias or rigidity. Fantastic Planet separates us from reality so that we ourselves become Topor’s unwary travellers being whipped and nipped at by the fearsome plants. Such a synthesis of the political with the surreal via animation could not be more clear than in the film’s juxtaposition of bureaucracy and political horror, to an almost hallucinatory, hypnotically psychedelic filmic dream logic (Fig. 7), elevated by Alain Goraguer’s mellifluous, ethereal score.
Fig. 7 - Fantastic Planet.
With its technical capacity to convert almost any aesthetic vision from the mind to the screen, animation has often been perceived as a surrealist art form. Etymologically, the term ‘surreal,’ is derived from the French ‘sur’ (beyond) and ‘réalisme’ (realism). Many animators have embraced realism to replicate the real, to provide an illusion to the audience. Some have opted for the ‘uncanny,’ a slightly off-kilter attempt at realism that can, intentionally or unintentionally, leave us with a particular unease, lost in the aether between the real and the dreamlike. Yet, animation has long provided filmmakers with the ability to transcend the real, to create imagery that we could never see in reality, to discuss and affect the real precisely by moving beyond it. It is a common misinterpretation of Surrealism that it is an artform that solely deals with the visions and structure of the irrational mind, the (Freudian) subconscious, the dreamworld. I would argue that in many cases, and particularly in the case of Fantastic Planet, Surrealism delves deep into the world of the subconscious, the abstract, precisely in its attempt to illuminate the world of the conscious, the rational. Fantastic Planet mesmerises and hypnotises us into a dreamlike state, only to explore the political with a far more visceral effect. Only in the dreamworld are my barriers and boundaries of preconceptions and bias asleep. Only when abstracted from recognizable reality can cinema awaken our most political of sensibilities.
**Article published: May 27, 2022**
References
Ashbee, Charles Robert. 1928. Caricature. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd.
Bitel, Anton. 2006. ‘Fantastic Planet Film Review.’ Eye For Film. https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/fantastic-planet-film-review-by-anton-bitel.
Breton, André. 1955. Les Manifestes du Surréalisme. Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1955.
Brooke, Michael. 2016. “Fantastic Planet: Gambous Amalga.” Criterion. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4112-fantastic-planet-gambous-amalga.
Herhuth, Eric. 2018. “Political Animation and Propaganda.” In The Animation Studies Reader, edited by Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell, 169–180. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada And Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, Howard. 1973. New York Times, ‘Fantastic Planet Is Animated Feature.’ https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/19/archives/fantastic-planet-is-animated-feature.html.
Biography
Benjamin Hart graduated with a BA Religion, Politics and Society from King's College London. He is now working for the film competition, Straight 8, while writing and directing short films and music videos.
