Fantastic Planet: Aliens Don’t Care About Human Rights
I am a person and I possess my body. So are you. That is agreed upon. Kant stated that a human being is not a thing, but an end in itself. We make and enforce our self-conceptualization, but why would an alien race have to follow human imperatives?
René Laloux and Roland Topor pose this question in Fantastic Planet. Viewers are pulled into a world where humans are flung to their death by giant blue fingers, mothers are killed clutching their babies, and children are dressed up and played with like dolls. Draags, a highly-evolved race of aliens, ruthlessly subjectify a race of tiny humans known as Oms. Draags live for thousands of years, but Oms breed like feral cats. The breathtaking animation, made all the more impressive given its production in 1973, makes the Om’s marginalization feel somehow soothing. Each frame was made through paper cutout animation, and Topor’s delicate animation suffuses the film with a mixture of cross-hatched cozyness and eerie surrealism that leaves one transfixed on planet Ygam and its inhabitants.
On the surface, it seems that one is supposed to hate the tyrannical Draags and identify with the powerless Oms. Draags are big humanoid aliens with round red eyes, gills for ears, and blue skin. They spend their days practicing astral projection and acquire information through complex and unfamiliar contraptions. Oms, on the other hand, are like us: hunter gatherers with an exceptional ability to evolve. They have very limited power, but they’re still tiny versions of us. Humans with meaning and purpose that should be protected. Naturally, I root for the Oms, but there’s always faint detachment present. Our society is chronically individualistic, and the concept of my existence being treated like a fleeting dot enmeshed in a unified whole is hard to accept.
The Draags, despite their round red gazes and skin-tight nippleless clothing, are relatable. They’re not one-dimensional aliens driven by evil—they’re intelligent beings capable of love and sympathy. Just as they cruelly exterminate the Oms like pests, they also treat them with the same loving condescension that we treat our pets. In the first half of the movie, we follow Tiva, a teenage Draag, and Terr, her pubescent Om pet. In a particularly touching scene, the little boy crouches in her big blue palm as Tiva commands him to express his love for her. They cuddle and fall asleep. The scene is hauntingly familiar, evoking memories of me caressing my small fluffy dog as a young girl.
Much can be said of the parallels between Tiva and Terr and our relationships with the powerless little creatures around us. The Draags dress their Oms in pompous outfits and implore them to sing—how humiliating! We dress up our dogs and make them do tricks. The Draags make Oms fight each other in a makeshift ring—how inhumane! We force animals to fight in rings, and not long ago, forced humans to do the same. The Draags crush dozens of Oms with their feet—how cruel! A week ago, I swatted a fly with a rolled-up newspaper, and ten years ago, I watched my classmates pour boiling water over an ant hill. Are the Draags evil? Am I evil? What the hell is evil, anyways?
Admittedly, I may relate to the Draags because I’m a human that has the privilege to own her existence as they do. Sacrificing my body to be crushed by a giant foot so that my fellow humans may live feels alien for somebody like me, but such injustice is a reality that people are forced to experience every day. Fantastic Planet’s story was born out of real subjugation: the film’s production was temporarily suspended by the Soviet invasion of Prague, and the relationship between the Draags and the Oms certainly indicates there are parallels present. Laloux and Topor were under the constraints of the era’s media suppression, yet their criticism of human tyranny could not be muffled, and remains ever relevant with the ongoing injustices in the present day.
Fantastic Planet is one of those films that I’m prompted to rewatch monthly, just to double check my brain didn’t conjure it up in a dream. Creating a sci-fi story with such hauntingly realistic subtext is a feat in itself, but for that story to be an animation is unbelievable. I cringe at my pretentiousness, but I don’t think a person can truly get animation until they’ve watched Fantastic Planet (and watched it several times, at that.) The film is shockingly ahead of its time, and still tethered to the 70s with its psychedelic jazz funk soundtrack and saturated landscapes. It has had immense influence in the animation tradition, yet nobody has come close to creating anything like it. I’m forever in search of other animated films that trigger some form of similar hypnosis, yet I always seem to melt into Fantastic Planet.