Fantastic Planet

Last night, some Carlisle kids and I watched a unique French/Checkoslovakian animation from the early '70s entitled La Planete Sauvage. While it could easily be dismissed as "trippy", and is from the same genre as Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (which is boring), it had several things going for it. First was the soundtrack, which was the droning, spaced-out jazz music Stereolab would be founded upon. Second were the depictions of the alien technology, which were thoroughly inventive and at times reminded me of Peter Chung's work. The evenly-hatched pen-and-ink drawings had an old-fashioned feeling; the animators had made a conscious choice of detail over frame-rate. Recommended!