Fantastic Planet c. 1973 : What a Draag

There’s nothing else out there quite like Fantastic Planet, that 1973 science-fiction freakout from French filmmakers René Laloux and Roland Topor and the Prague-based Jiří Trnka Studio. To see images from it are to have them forever seared on the brain. Who could forget the giant blue-skinned Draag, with their lidless red eyes and a tendency to keep humans (called Oms) as pets, sometimes indulging the much-smaller species and sometimes subjecting its members to random acts of capricious cruelty? Czech artist Trnka, who died in 1969, was best known for his reliance on puppets and paper in animation, and Laloux had a background in puppetry as well, and the result of the latter’s five-year cross-European collaboration with the studio was a film that used paper cutouts and dreamlike backdrops to unique and unsettling ends.

Fantastic Planet is an all-purpose allegory about oppression that at varying times has been read as having a message about slavery, about animal rights, and about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The truth is that it’s malleable enough to be repurposed for any conflict, as the oppressed Oms learn to use Draag knowledge and technology against their captors. The po-faced story is lightened up considerably by the heavy streak of psychedelia in the imagery, something that’s made the film a treasured party backdrop, especially in the scene in which four adult Draags are shown meditating. As their bodies shift kaleidoscopically into strange, organic shapes as they travel with their minds, it’s clear that what you’re watching is sci-fi, sure, but with an unmissable whiff of substances to it.

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html