Now on Blu-Ray, Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973)

Up until a couple of months ago you’d have been hard pressed to explain to me the point or the necessity of getting a Blu-Ray player, but there’s been a number of releases recently that have made me change my mind about the new format. A good deal of these have come courtesy of the Eureka label, including the exclusive releases of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl, which I aim to cover on this site soon, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which I’ve just reviewed as part of the latest Midnight Eye update. The UK-based distributor is now also in the process of upgrading some of the more popular titles from its Masters of Cinema range to exploit the medium’s fuller possibilities, with July’s releases including another classic Imamura title, Vengeance is Mine, which I reviewed on Midnight Eye when the original DVD came out a number of years ago, and René Laloux’s trippy 1973 animation Fantastic Planet. I wrote something about this for Twitch when the DVD came out, but since the new Blu-Ray version is considerably expanded from this original release, I thought the best way to go was to present my original review here in a slightly re-edited version, with added comments pertaining to this reissue. Here goes, then…

Psychedelic French sci-fi from Rene Laloux

Back in 2006, Eureka was responsible for the UK DVD debut of René Laloux’s psychedelic animated sci-fi, Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), which represented the first time the company had dipped their toes into the animation pool with their Masters of Cinema series, and it was particularly refreshing to see a company out there with the belief that animators are just as eligible for cinéastic canonisation as their live-action counterparts. Until then, there had been, and in fact still is really, a general tragic dearth of DVD releases of non-American or non-Japanese animation, and if anything Laloux’s 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winner serves to remind us of the rich tradition in European animation that bridges the gap between these two extremes.

It is almost de rigeur to cite Hayao Miyazaki’s seal of approval on any slightly off-centre animated release, but the claim on the cover blurb of the Blu-Ray and DVD that this adaptation of Stephan Wul’s novel ‘Oms en série’ “can be seen to prefigure much of the work” of the director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away still seems pretty apt: it’s easy to spot more than a passing resemblance between this film’s depiction of two warring races battling it out in a hallucinogenic alien landscape of bizarre vegetation and strange buildings with that of Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

Rene Laloux provided an early influence for Miyazaki

The story charts the hostilities between the blue-skinned, red-eyed, web-eared Draags and the more traditionally humanoid but miniscule Oms (Nausicaa featured ‘Ohms’) with whom they share an antagonistic existence on the same planet of Ygam. One of the Om’s is plucked from his mother’s bosom as a baby by Draag girl Tiwa, re-christened Terr and raised as a pet. Tiwa is an indulgent keeper to Terr, nurturing him to adulthood and pumping him full of knowledge from the Draag’s shared information pool. The other Draags however, are complete shits, in one scene tying the hair of two tiny Oms together and forcing them to fight to untangle themselves. But soon Tiwa too becomes bored with her new plaything, allowing Terr to escape into the wild and share his knowledge with a tribe of wild Oms. But by this time the Draag’s are stepping up their plans to begin the merciless process of ‘de-omisation’ and rid the planet of their verminous competitors.

Oms vs. Draags

Blessed with an all-pervading psychotropic atmosphere and a wonderfully trippy soundtrack from Alain Goraguer’s not to dissimilar to the later work of Gallic retro-boppers Air, Fantastic Planet whisks you right back to the early 70s (the full soundtrack is included on the new Blu-Ray, a welcome addition, but I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to include it on a separate CD? If you want to listen to it now, you basically have to do so through your TV rather than a CD player, using up a lot of electricity and boosting your carbon footprint in the process. Maybe there’s a way around this, but I’ve yet to discover it). I hesitate to use the word ‘surreal’, because it has become so dulled by overuse as to become almost meaningless, but if there was an animated work that warranted such a label, it is this one. Be warned though – the drug-inspired and often highly sexualised designs complete with images of bare-breasted aliens will probably deter the more Victorian-minded from presenting this to their pre-teens as a Disney substitute. This is definitely one to be filed under the category of “adult art animation”.

Included on the Blu-Ray is Alain Goraguer's gloriously retro soundtrack

That said, it is also doubtful whether most modern-day adults will pick up on the underlying metaphor. The humanoid ‘Oms’ and the domineering Draags were regarded at the time as a allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslavakia, although in this respect it is also worth quoting from Craig Keller’s brilliant essay ‘The Schizophrenic Cinema of René Laloux’, contained in the disk’s accompanying booklet, which makes the astute comment that “One might reflect on the connotations inherent to names like Terr (“terre” is French for “earth”), Oms (“hommes” = “men,” “mankind”), and Draags (“drogues” = “drugs”), although searching for a more complex allegorical interplay between these three referents is unlikely to result in anything that can be said to scan sensibly.” The film was in fact a French-Czech co-production made at Jiri Trnka’s studios in Prague (where the Japanese stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto also served an apprenticeship earlier in the decade – in fact, as much as Terry Gilliam’s animated interludes for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Laloux’s film bears a distinct similarity in ambience and design to Kawamoto’s collage animation The Trip (Tabi), which also critiqued the Soviet invasion). In marked contrast to Kawamoto’s happy experiences in Prague however, the five years it took to complete Fantastic Planet were allegedly something of nightmare for the French animator, who was almost ousted from the director’s chair by various Czech rivals during the production.

Don't mess with Draags, kids

All of this information, and a good deal more regarding Laloux’s background and that of his collaborator, the illustrator-musician-writer-filmmaker Roland Topor, is contained in one of Eureka’s customarily informative colour booklets, which at 56 pages is now double the size of the one included with the original DVD release. The Blu-Ray package also expands on the number of Laloux’s other short films from the two included first time round (his 1965 cut-out collaboration with Topor, Les Escargots, and a really intriguing cel-animated piece created long after his association with the illustrator had ended, this time realised with the staff of Pyongyang animation studios in 1987, entitled Comment Wang-Fo Fut Sauvé) to five.

Classic animated surrealism, Les Escargots (1965)

The first of these shorts to be included, Les Dents du Singe (1960), is a real treat. Basically, the story of how Laloux got into the world of animation is pretty weird in its own right. He actually started off working at La Borde Psychiatric Clinic in Cour-Cheverny in 1956, a sort of progressive lunatic asylum in which the inmates were encouraged to participate in creative activities as part of their treatment. Laloux oversaw the first of these, Tic-Tac (1957), a live-action shadow puppet theatre in the vein of Lotte Reiniger and filmed in 16mm monochrome that somehow ended up on French television. This was followed by his first colour film Les Achalunés, shot using backlit pieces of tinted glass. Sadly, neither of these are included on the disk, although clips from Tic-Tac appear in the 27-minute French documentary from 2003 entitled Laloux Sauvage, in which Laloux gets to tell his bizarre life-story firsthand. Anyway, Les Dents du Singe (1960) was the last such collaboration with the clinic’s inmates, and the one that effectively propelled him into a new phase in his artistic career, marked by his fruitful association with Roland Topor.

Well, there’s clearly a lot to be said about Laloux’s idiosyncratic output, so I’d advise anyone interested to check out this great new release of a truly wonderful film. I ended my review of Eureka’s first DVD of this film in 2006 thus: “Having gorged myself on the contents of this beautiful disk several times now, I am left with an overwhelming appetite to see more of Laloux’s mesmerizing work in the animation field. His 1988 feature Gandahar sounds really intriguing… Anyone at Eureka listening?” Well, whether they were listening specifically to me or not (probably not, let’s face it), Eureka did end up releasing a DVD of Laloux’s final animated feature (btw, not only was Gandahar also animated in North Korea, but equally bizarrely, a certain Bob Weinstein is credited as the producer of the English-laguage version), and also his 1982 feature Les Maîtres du Temps. Perhaps these will be due for a Blu-Ray upgrade soon too?

Stephan Wul's novel of Fantastic Planet now published in English by Creaton Books

As a quick postscript, I should mention that Stephan Wul’s 1957 novel on which Lalous based his animation is now available in an English-language translation from Creation Books. There’s a bit of info on Wul in the Blu-Ray booklet too. Apparently his primary profession was not as a science fiction writer, but as a dentist, a profession which he found considerably more lucrative despite the high regard his stories were held in (although let’s face it, no one is talking about the quality of his root canal work now, are they).

Brigitte Helm leads the excited charge in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)

However, I don’t want to talk about Herzog for the moment, but instead hark back further in time to when German cinema was quite incontestably (in my opinion) the best in the world. Admittedly, this was over 80 years ago, but during the silent era no studio ever bridged the gap between art and commerce as successfully as the Berlin-based UFA, or to give it it’s full name, the Universum Film AG. UK distributors Eureka have already left an indelible glow in my heart due to their peerless releases of Japanese films such as Humanity and Paper Balloons, Face of Another, House, which I reviewed for Sight and Sound in March of this year, and more recently the Blu-ray of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, but their championing of some of the best German silent films through their Masters of Cinema label really clinches it for me.

After discovering the company hold a monthly sale on their website, I picked up one of these early releases, Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon, a couple of months back. Now, I’m not as familiar with the work of Fritz Lang as perhaps I should or want to be. I’d always considered him as playing slightly a second fiddle to UFA’s most celebrated genius, F.W. Murnau. This favouritism is no doubt more than a little coloured by Murnau’s premature demise in circumstances that have given rise to much mythologising, as well as leaving us wondering how the director of such macabre silent classics as Nosferatu and Faust might have fared during the sound era. Despite his sizeable output, Murnau perhaps didn’t have the same amount of time on this earth to put a foot wrong. Still, on the evidence of this film, to champion one at the expense of another isn’t entirely fair. What Murnau did with light and shadow, one might say, Lang did with line and form. The stories Lang told, which during this period were scripted by his then wife Thea von Harbou from her own novels, are less primal perhaps, but reward deeper analysis, and his work really sowed the seeds of cinema’s core genres – take for example, the secret-surveillance world of the Dr Mabuse films or his hugely influential spy-thriller Spione (1928).

Fritz Lang’s curiously overlooked Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon

I’m going to write more about Murnau at a later date, but for now, lets focus on Lang, whose best known work is, of course, his epic imagining of the city of the future, Metropolis (1927), a title that any serious film fan worth their salt will have seen at least once, and apparently the first ever work of cinema to be listed by the UNESCO Memory of the World as an essential cultural artifact. Serious film fans will soon want to be giving it a second look too, as they’ll know doubt be aware that it has come in for some substantial restoration and is due to be released with an extra 25 minutes worth of footage believed lost to the world for over 80 years, only unearthed recently in Argentina, of all places. This recent discovery of the dusty old 16mm dupe negative at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires is nothing short of miraculous, and really raises ones hope that all those thousands of other titles believed no longer extant have at least some slim chance of turning up again somewhere in time. (As a quick aside, the BFI has just begun a season of “Elusive British films previously thought to be lost” entitled Long Live Film: BFI Most Wanted, which will be screening at the Southbank until 20 August). Anyway, the full story of the Metropolis restoration can be read about on the website, and the new version will be going out across the UK and Ireland from 10 September this year, with a DVD and Blu-ray to follow.

Visions of the future, in Lang's Metropolis (1927)

I was lucky enough, on one of my rare forays outside the house recently, to be invited to a press screening where I got my first glimpse of this new version. My first impression was just how clear the familiar footage, projected in this case from DVD, looked in this restoration. Its modernist designs looked so fresh, so pristine, it is almost impossible to imagine that the film was made 83 years ago. The older footage was understandably less clean, although it was integrated into the film perfectly, and while it was easy to see the joins, this didn’t distract from the viewing experience at all. In summary though, you’re pretty much getting a totally different experience watching this more complete version (there’s a few fragments still considered lost to the world), with at least one sub-story emerging into significant with the re-fleshing of the bare bones, and even the odd re-instated reaction shots giving a wholly different emphasis to key scenes.

The new restored Metropolis goes out across the UK and Ireland in September

The most head-scratching piece of the puzzle for me is that, given how timelessly classic this film is, how did we ever get in the situation where almost a quarter of the footage ended lost in the first place? The basic story is that after its premiere in Berlin on 10 January 1927 in the original 4189-metre director’s cut, Metropolis was released in the USA in a version heavily butchered by Paramount, with the intertitles rewritten, characters’ names changed, and large segments excised. Back in Germany, on 26 August the original was withdrawn and reissued in a similarly truncated 3241-metre version. The complete version of the film hasn’t been since, but at least on 10 September 2010, the general public will be as close to witnessing Lang’s full original as anyone has ever been over the past 83 years.

Wage slaves - the future labour force that keeps Metropolis ticking along

Frau im Mond was Lang’s last silent film and his second and final stab at science fiction after Metropolis (despite the title, his 1955 Moonfleet was actually about smugglers). It takes a radically different approach to its better known counterpart, more rip-roaring space opera than rigorous social allegory. Stripping the plot down to its basics, it portrays a group of benevolent scientists who create a space rocket only to find their efforts literally hijacked by a cartel of greedy capitalists who wish to co-opt their invention for their own nefarious ends, to gain access to the wealth of gold ore conjectured to exist on the dark side of the moon. There’s a bit of a sexual tension on the good guys’ side, with the female astronaut Friede (the “woman in the moon” of the title) the axis of attention among her two male rivals, and a rocket-obsessed 11-year-old boy also hops along for the ride.

Lang's final silent film and final foray into science fiction, Frau im Mond

At 163 minutes (as it plays on the Eureka disk), Frau im Mond is perhaps a rather lengthy undertaking, especially given that the first half is given over entirely to setting up the characters prior to their launch into space. It never bored me though. Again, I really savoured the modernist Art deco designs, even in the earthbound sequences. The general air of quaintness reminded me a little of the Tintin comic book Destination Moon from 1953, while the science behind the fiction was particularly intriguing, drawing heavily upon the writings of a certain Professor Hermann Oberth, a school master and amateur physicist who published heavily in the field of theoretical rocket science. The short documentary included on the Eureka disk is full of all sorts of fascinating insights. Frau im Mond included the first ever 10-9-8-7… countdown sequence, adopted by NASA for their first successful space rocket launch some 30 years laters, and the rocket technology underpinning it was considered so realistic that the film was subsequently banned by the Nazi party, who were then researching missile technology for military means, resulting in the V-2 long distance rocket that entered production in 1943. After the war, a large number of German rocket scientists were recruited by NASA to assist in their space programme.

Who needs a helmet? A moon landing as imagined in 1929, in Lang's Frau im Mond

But there are also other things – the film portrays how the characters are effected by the weightlessness of space, at a time long before anyone had ventured into the upper atmosphere, yet not its airlessness, allowing them to bounce about on the moon’s surface without helmets and oxygen tanks. The costly flop of Metropolis explains why the production values look a little slimmed down, with the moon basically little more than a painted backdrop, although this adds a certain retro something to proceedings, and invokes memories of the Georges Méliès proto-science fiction adventure film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) from 1902.

So while you’re waiting to reacquaint yourself with the Metropolis restoration, I heartily recommend you take a look at this lesser-known work, which might not have the same epic status, but is highly enjoyable and just as thought-provoking in its own right.

Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods from Eureka

Just back at home a few days from a 10-day break in Kenya en route to my next stop on a work/research trip to Japan, and while I should be busy unpacking my shorts, swimming trucks and suntan lotion in exchange for clothing more suitable for the icy climbs of Hokkaido where I’ll be heading on Wednesday for Yubari film festival, I just couldn’t contain myself at the news, which reached me via the Wildgrounds website, that UK label Eureka are to release Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods on Blu-Ray in May as part of their Masters of Cinema series.

Profound Desire of the Gods

Yes, it’s slightly annoying that this is only on Blu-Ray, but on a more positive side, this is the first time that I’ve felt the Blu-Ray I’ve had hooked up to the HD TV for the past 9 months has actually been necessary. Imamura’s film is a beautiful-looking work, shot in vibrant colours in verdant, tropical climes, all in expansive widescreen NikkatsuScope. This is a film I’d been waiting to see ever since I first read about it about ten years ago while researching the Imamura chapter of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. It’s true, while I was living in Japan, I could quite easily have rented the VHS and watched it without subtitles, but from what I’d read, this film was so close to my own interests and tastes that I wanted my first encounter with it to be a little more special, which is the main reason for getting involved in the Imamura showcase at Bristol’s Arnolfini last October (see my thoughts on the retro), to actually bring a subtitled print across to the UK. Well, the film was everything I’d hoped for and more, from the bizarre opening sequence of a pig being throw into the sea as a sacrifice to be feasted upon by sharks to the coda set on the ludicrous tourist train, and caused much discussion with the other viewers at the Arnolfini after the screening finished. This is an utterly one-off work, and I am trembling in anticipation at seeing it up on a screen again. I can’t emphasize how much I love the films of Shohei Imamura. This is among the best, ranking in my books alongside Pigs and Battleships and The Ballad of Narayama. Imamura is pretty well-represented on region 1 DVD, but I just hope this Eureka release garners enough attention and excitement for further UK releases of his films. These really benefit from being seen as a large a screen in as high resolution as possible.

Profound Desires of the Gods

I do remember suggesting this title to Masters of Cinema quite a few years ago, so whether they took my advice, or were inspired by the Imamura season last year, or already had it under consideration anyway, I don’t know. I’m just ecstatic it’s imminent. Now its time to work on the next campaign to spread the word outside Japan about forgotten or unknown classics from forgotten or unknown filmmakers, and the next candidate is Susumu Hani, a director who I am quite flabbergasted that Western distributors or film curators have not picked up on yet. Following the Tomu Uchida season, Alex Jacoby and I pitched a retrospective of this figure to the British Film Institute, but didn’t get any response at all – the powers-that-be there obviously think it safer to stick with what they know, so we get Ozu and Kurosawa retrospectives again this year. Anyway, keep your eyes fixed on Midnight Eye, as you’ll find out plenty more on Hani there in the coming month or so.

In the meantime, as mentioned, I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow, and to Yubari Film Festival on Wednesday, from which I hope to post updates about the good films on offer there. I also hope to post a bit more on some other Eureka releases which I’ve not had time to write about yet, so I hope to be rather more active on this site than I have been over the past month or so.

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