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A child's game from the plaything's terrified perspective introduces life on planet Ygam, presided over by blue-skinned, bland-voiced giants with lidless crimson eyes, the Draags. A Lilliputian race known as the Oms struggles to survive, seen by the behemoths at best as pets and at worst as vermin. The orphaned boy is adopted by an adolescent Draag, collared and dressed in tiny jester togs, secretly absorbing knowledge off his owner's malfunctioning educational headset. "It was possible to learn. The problem was, did I want to?" Tanguy and Borowczyk are the visual basis for the Swiftian parable, a serenely cruel reverie illustrated by Roland Topor and animated by René Laloux. The protagonist's escape and the exodus toward one of the planet's moons chart out the uncanny landscape—from the Big Tree to the rocket junkyard, tribes in abandoned zones vulnerable to pest-control raids. Crystals sprout like mushrooms and are shattered by whistling, a chortling flytrap exists to snatch and smash birds, roots and canals and crevasses are woozily sexualized. The glow-in-the-dark procession from Fantasia is reimagined as a tasteful forest orgy, the Draags meanwhile take flight in meditation for the literally out-of-body experience of spiritual bubbles attached to headless, waltzing statues (cf. Mallarmé's dream of the dancer's entrechats). Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels and Dunning's Yellow Submarine go into it, the end of the Planet of the Apes series is concurrent. A patchwork of cutouts from Soviet science magazines pinned into psychedelic tableaux, with trippy synthesizers and an authentic sense of placid terror to give teeth to its allegories. With the voices of Jennifer Drake, Eric Baugin, Jean Topart, and Jean Valmont.
--- Fernando F. Croce |