Fantastic Planet (An American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

It might seem perverse to include arguably the most famous French animated film ever made in An American’s Guide to Czech Movies. But Fantastic Planet is just as Czech as it is French — it was produced at the studios of our old friend Jiří Trnka, meaning Czechia has just as much a claim to the movie as France does.

Fantastic Planet’s premise is pretty barebones: tiny humans called Oms (a pun on the French word homme) are persecuted by a race of blue humanoid giants called the Draags. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that — except that the movie is visually extremely weird. Like Trnka Studios’ other work, it has this anti-realist realism to it, looking fabricated and real at the same time.

A story like this, about masters and slaves, was bound to resonate in Czechoslovakia at the time. But the problem with Fantastic Planet is that as simplistic as it is, it is also extremely semiotically confused. At various points, the persecution of the Draags stands in for the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and French colonialism. Any two of these would be contradictory frameworks at best. When they’re combined, they produce basically nothing except “what if there was a bloody war and some people got oppressed?” And when you get to the Draags having superior technology, the Oms being primitives who fear anything more advanced than them, and the contrived ending where both parties suddenly live in peace, you’re getting some ugly racial and colonial politics.

Of course, people remember Fantastic Planet for its bizarre imagery. Aside from the classic scenes of the Draags meditating, there’s great stuff like the Oms having a weird, unclear ritual on a Draag skull, and a bizarre Jabberwocky-like creature sucking up the Oms with a phallic tongue poking into the tunnels of their home. It may be gross and reactionary and plotless, but it’s memorable.

But I’ll let my girlfriend Janet summarize Fantastic Planet: “A profound commentary on racism? One of them is tiny.”