Fantastic Planet - The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray)

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.

• France, Czechoslovakia
• 72 minutes
• Color
• 1.66:1
• French
• Spine #820
• 1973

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

- New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate English-language soundtrack
- Les temps morts (1965) and Les escargots (1966), two early short films by director René Laloux and illustrator Roland Topor
- Laloux sauvage, a 2009 documentary on Laloux
- Episode of the French television program Italiques from 1974 about Topor’s work
- Interview with Topor from 1973
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Brooke

*New cover by Eric Skillman