Interview: Jean-Gaspard Páleníček & Fantastic Planet

Fantastic Planet? A timeless, thought-provoking, and ambiguous film, says researcher

A hidden gem that even today still has something to say. That’s one way to describe the French-Czechoslovak animated sci-fi film Fantastic Planet (1973). It is referenced, among other works, by the vastly better-known Avatar series directed by James Cameron as well as by a number of other filmmakers. Two years ago, a book about this cult film was published in French, with a major contribution from this year’s Anifilm guest Jean-Gaspard Páleníček, who has done extensive research on the film. In the interview, he outlines the circumstances of the creation of this remarkable piece of cinema, describes how its filming took place, and explains why he is delighted by the renewed interest in it.

You worked on the book The Odyssey of the Fantastic Planet (Capricci, 2023), co-authoring it with Xavier Kawa-Topor and Fabrice Blin. What specifically did you contribute?

Fabrice Blin, a director and the author of the leading monograph on the film’s director René Laloux, contributed mainly biographical chapters. Xavier Kawa-Topor, a leading French animation expert and the main initiator of the project, focused mainly on formal and content analyses. And I wrote chapters in which I tried to recount how the co-production was arranged and describe the process of filming in Czechoslovakia. I did my best to collect testimonies of direct participants, animators, and the cameraman. Unfortunately, I was able to get access neither to the archival documents kept in the National Film Archive nor to those kept in the archive of Krátký film Praha. The thing is, until now, the story widely considered authoritative was the one given by René Laloux himself, which is, however, fragmentary and was told from the view of a person relatively unfamiliar with the Czech context.

What did you learn from the direct participants of the shooting during your research?

The making of the film was accompanied by various mishaps. It was preceded by the political rapprochement between Czechoslovakia and France in the second half of the 1960s, which in 1967 resulted, among other things, in a partial agreement to co-produce several films: Fantastic Planet was to be the first of them. However, its production began in the spring of 1968 and soon everything came to a halt for a year because of the Soviet invasion of August 1968. Filming resumed in the summer of 1969 and was finished in January 1973. The main creative team consisted of director Laloux, who commuted regularly to Czechoslovakia, animator Josef Kábrt, and producer Václav Strnad. According to some testimonies, in the later years, Laloux would come to the filming only once a month for a few days, which would partly corroborate the opinion of some people that the film was co-directed by Kábrt. But this is a rather inaccurate interpretation. In his search, Xavier Kawa-Topor managed to discover the film’s storyboard in the Bibliothèque du cinéma François-Truffaut in Paris – it was completely developed and hand-drawn by Laloux, including the lengths of the shots. Laloux also created most of the layouts, so the filming was indeed carried out according to his intentions and instructions, undermining another myth persisting in France – that Roland Topor, co-writer of the screenplay and the author of the film’s visual style, had a major hand in the final look of the film. In fact, he spent only two weeks in Czechoslovakia at the very beginning of the project.

It is a historical paradox that this exceptional film was made in the Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague at the time of the greatest decline of Czechoslovak cinema caused by the onset of normalisation. How was this possible? How did the filming go and how did historical events impact the genesis of the film?

The crew was able to resume filming in part thanks to the help of a delegation of French filmmakers led by Paul Grimault and a financial injection from French producers. Once the rather dramatic halt in filming due to the invasion had passed, production restarted and then kept running smoothly. A special section, independent within Krátký film Praha, which was then already affected by normalization, was established for the purpose of making the film. Laloux was provided with an interpreter. According to the testimony of the filmmakers involved, the Czech authorities gave priority to the financial aspect, i.e., to fulfilling the contract in order to ensure a regular influx of foreign currency.

Why was the filming prematurely terminated? There’s an entire sequence missing from the film – can you tell us about it? How did that affect the film as a whole?

When you compare the finished film with the storyboard, there are three sequences missing that would have enriched the film quite a bit. The finished film doesn't have a long running time, so their omission likely wasn't intentional (as was the case with the sequences that appear in the original published script and that the filmmakers discarded before filming). But the question is how and why this happened – whether the director was forced to drop them by the Czech team, for example, to speed up the shooting, which had already been running long, and whether he agreed to it, albeit reluctantly... I have a theory, but it is really just a theory and should be taken with a handful of salt. When I was looking for traces of the project in the Security Services Archive, I came across the file of the normalization-era French cultural attaché. It contained transcripts of conversations from a business lunch that took place in 1975 at the French Embassy and was attended by the then new director of Krátký film Praha, Kamil Pixa. When asked by French diplomats why there were no further co-productions as intended, he replied: “Well, you see, when I came to France in 1972 for my first visit, I was immediately arrested by the French secret police. Surely you will understand that under such circumstances any further collaboration is out of the question.” I’d like to point out that he was arrested in April 1972 because he had actively participated as a State Security officer in the persecution of foreign diplomats, including French ones, in the early 1950s. Kamil Pixa, however, is a contradictory figure. We need to be very wary about taking him at his word, so we cannot say for certain that his wanting to take revenge on the French actually led to the decision to end the filming. It’s just a speculative piece of the puzzle.

Is it true that the film was eventually finished in France?

The post-production was finished in France. The film was being edited as it was being shot. Whenever Laloux arrived, he would begin his stay with a screening of the newly filmed material, which was continuously edited by Marta Látalová. He would follow up with any potential criticism, instructions for corrections, and comments and recommendations on the next parts of the shooting plan. The final edit is the work of Hélène Arnal. The characters speak in French: Laloux made a non-professional recording with some friends that served as a sound reference for the Czech animators during the filming. The dubbing, music, and sound were then recorded in France – in a relatively record time, so that the film could be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

As you mentioned, a comparison with the storyboard showed that there were several sequences missing from the film. Can you elaborate on them?

By the way, interestingly, according to the filmmakers’ testimonies, there were supposedly three storyboards. The first one was drawn by Laloux for submission to the French authorities when applying for subsidies and its whereabouts are currently unknown. The second one was Laloux’s personal copy. And the third one served as a reference for Czech filmmakers during the filming. I would be very interested to know if it still exists.

But let’s get back to the missing sequences. There’s a passage in the film where the children of the blue giants, the Draags, are learning to meditate as they approach adolescence. This sequence is in the film, but it’s shorter than intended. Then there is the missing sequence in which the human protagonist has a dream in which he interacts with Tiva, the girl who keeps him as a pet at the beginning of the film. The absence of this sequence is palpable because it would emphasize its psychoanalytical interpretation – the need for emancipation by gaining access to knowledge, by learning. The key character of Tiva was intended to be at the centre of both sequences, and it is a pity that she almost completely disappears from the film after the first third. The most extensive missing sequence was supposed to be towards the end. According to the storyboard, it should have lasted a good ten minutes. It’s a sequence depicting humans leaving the Draags en masse to create their own safe city, their own civilization. It was supposed to feature a number of fantastical animals. The absence of this sequence is certainly palpable as well, but it probably wouldn’t have made a major change to the message of the very finale of the film.

I personally thought that, considering how the story was unfolding, the film ended very quickly, suddenly...

That’s true. But that was probably intentional – even the beginning of the film is sudden, abrupt in Laloux’s version. I must mention one other thing. While working on the book, I discovered that the Czech version of the film is different from the French or rather international one.

How?

For one thing, it has different opening and ending sequences. Laloux’s version starts with blue subtitles on a black background. The Czech version starts with a sequence, in which the camera zooms through space to the planet Ygam, where the story takes place, and ends with the camera moving away from the planet again (one immediately wonders if and how the space race in the context of the Cold War might have influenced this choice). The Czech version has a lot more voiceovers, which I think is to its detriment. A lot of things that are clearly implied by the plot and what is happening on screen are explicitly explained in the Czech version by the voice of the human protagonist Terra. But the most significant difference is the ending. In Laloux’s version, the reconciliation of the Draags with the humans occurs not on the initiative of the human protagonist, as it does in the Czech version, but at the behest of one of the members of the senate of the giants, which is quite a significant difference. The Czech version builds more on the simple antagonism of “humans against giants”, while Laloux’s version also points out the internal antagonisms within the individual social groups. It is richer, more complex. The Czech version comes off as moralistic: the more developed (Western?) giants provide the humans with access to modern technology, while the (Eastern, socialist?) humans teach the giants love and consideration. The Czech version is also missing an important reminder by the character Tiva and Laloux’s reflection on how we view history, which we usually present using truncated, simplistic historical narratives.

How do you explain the differences between the French and Czech versions?

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any demonstrable explanation. Even the testimonies of the people I was able to interview were of no help in this respect, because these decisions were made without them.

For many decades after the Second World War, Czechoslovak animation was one of the best in the world. What do you think Fantastic Planet would look like without Czech participation?

This is an important question. The film is often perceived in the Czech Republic as an essentially Czech film that was merely visually designed by a French artist – as was the case with the 1958 film The Creation of the World. This is a rather unfair view. According to testimonies of foreign filmmakers who had the experience of filming in Czechoslovakia at that time, such as, besides Laloux, Gene Deitch or Kihachirō Kawamoto, Czech animation was at a relatively low level compared to the technical and production standards of the West and even Poland. However, this was balanced out by its ingenuity, improvisation, and creative ambition, due to which a number of films of high artistic quality were produced while the regime allowed such production and before it switched to primarily commercial projects. It is true, however, that the film could not have been made without Czech collaborators, if only for financial reasons. The last feature-length animated film made in France at the time came out in 1953. I’m talking about Paul Grimault’s The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep, which, as is well known, did not turn out well – the film was re-edited by the producer before it was released, and Grimault’s production company went bankrupt. It would have been simply impossible to shoot a feature-length animated film for adults with high artistic ambitions and science fiction elements in 1960s France without using cheaper labour – from the East. The same reasons led Laloux to make his following two features in Hungary and North Korea.

And what do you personally think are the merits of the film? What makes it special?

Some factors are purely external. Just the fact that the creators were able to have it accepted into the main competition at Cannes and that it won an award, which was by no means a matter of course. Before it, very few animated films had been accepted to the Cannes competition, and they were mainly produced by Disney, the only exception being Trnka’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was awarded in 1959. In 1973 the Cannes competition included Marco Ferreri’s The Big Feast as well as Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, which are fairly atypical films that stirred controversy and next to which Fantastic Planet got a chance to properly stand out as a significant film, which might not have happened under different circumstances. As a result, the film got wider theatrical release in France and attracted a fair number of viewers. It also led to its being purchased for distribution in the United States by Roger Corman (a producer of B movies, who, however, also distributed films by Fellini and Bergman, for example). He did rip off the French production financially, but on the other hand, as a result, the film became a cult classic among alternative artists, intellectuals, and rock bands and is still to this day referenced by new generations of these groups. Even relatively recently, in 2006, Sean Lennon, John Lennon’s son, made a music video paraphrasing Fantastic Planet. The film's music, composed by Alain Goraguer, is still sampled by American rappers today. Fantastic Planet is referenced by the blue giants in Cameron’s Avatar franchise but also in a variety of other films, from Alê Abreu’s The Boy and the World (2013) to Michael Dudok de Witt’s The Red Turtle (2016) and Dash Shaw’s Cryptozoo (2021). The film also had a very clear impact on Japanese science fiction animation. We can see it both in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) and Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion (1995). It is no coincidence that Hayao Miyazaki devoted an entire article in the Anido magazine to Fantastic Planet in 1980, just a few years before a significant shift in his work represented by the manga and later film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (released in 1984).

And these are already merits related to the film itself. Besides its artistic and animation qualities, I believe that another important feature is that the film does is not limited to a single interpretation and instead of offering a clear-cut worldview, it poses a range of questions; that the film invites the viewer to find their own interpretation – whether they interpret it as a psychoanalytic reflection or a political or humanist metaphor. Its timelessness is guaranteed precisely by its richness of ideas and ambiguity.

However, the film isn’t very well known in the Czech Republic. How do you explain this?

If that’s the case, I don’t have a clear answer. The film was released in Czechoslovakia towards the end of 1973 and did reasonably well. There weren’t many reviews at the time, but there were some. I came across several club screenings that took place during normalisation, and it was regularly shown on TV after 1989. In 2010, it was released on DVD. I get the sense that some people from the industry still perceive it as a commissioned work – i.e., something that we can be proud of, but not something we need to pay much attention to anymore. Perhaps we’re also reluctant to get into what we actually did to our own animated film production during the transformation of our society in the 1990s. I don't know.

The book that you co-authored was published two years ago, but only in French. Will there ever be a Czech edition?

There has been interest in an English edition, but I can’t say anything more specific about it yet. A Czech edition would certainly please me, and hopefully not only me. In addition to the release of the book The Odyssey of the Wild Planet, the film was restored for its 50th anniversary, re-released in cinemas, released in a new Blu-ray edition, its soundtrack came out on vinyl, and it has been re-engaging interest from people who had seen it before as well as attracting many new viewers, including in the Czech Republic. Recently, I was contacted by a researcher who is part of a research project studying cultural transfers in Czech animated films from 1939–1992 and who is currently going through some unprocessed collections at the National Film Archive. Naturally, this may not be connected to our book, but it would make me happy if the renewed interest in the film helped shed more light on its creation.

Jean-Gaspard Páleníček was interviewed by Ondřej Kůs.