![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jul. 21st, 2014 10:28 pm
Om Mani Pedi Om
I tried to call my older brother for his birthday but I only got my brother-in-law and my sister (fresh from the Jane Austen Festival in Louisville) instead. In preparation I'd even watched La planète sauvage, a trippy French/Czech animated film from 1973. (Actually, they'd begun work on it in 1967 but due to the turbulence of the times and disputes with the animation workshop it took a lot of doing to get a finished print released.) Not sure how my brother came across it, but he wanted to compare impressions.
The surreal imagery, stately pace, and somewhat disjointed plot (according to one of the producers in the making-of featurette, four sequences are missing) leave ample room for personal interpretations. At first I tried to read it as a straightforward political allegory, but I got more out of it when I tried to view it as a meditation on the nature of the creative process itself. It all feels very 60s and very very French. No wonder it won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
The DVD was badly organised, but I eventually found the Special Features. There was an earlier collaboration between the same artist and director about an attack of giant snails from the French countryside and a music video which seemed to be of more recent vintage inspired by the main feature but not directly related to it. I got the most out of the interviews with director René Laloux, a disheveled Santa bear and diehard Marxist. He actually got his start doing art therapy at a psychiatric clinic in Loir-et-Cher, which led to creating animated shorts incorporating the patients' own artwork.
I'm kind of at a loss about what to watch next. Apparently Laloux went to to create a film together with Mœbius, but as per usual, it's not available on NetFlix. As I was complaining to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu the other night, nothing ever makes the jump from "Saved (Availability unknown)" to the queue. It really functions more as as a reminder to me of cool foreign films I've heard about that someday, when the politics of film distribution finally catch up to the technology of it, I might actually be able to order from somebody.
The surreal imagery, stately pace, and somewhat disjointed plot (according to one of the producers in the making-of featurette, four sequences are missing) leave ample room for personal interpretations. At first I tried to read it as a straightforward political allegory, but I got more out of it when I tried to view it as a meditation on the nature of the creative process itself. It all feels very 60s and very very French. No wonder it won the Grand Prix at Cannes.The DVD was badly organised, but I eventually found the Special Features. There was an earlier collaboration between the same artist and director about an attack of giant snails from the French countryside and a music video which seemed to be of more recent vintage inspired by the main feature but not directly related to it. I got the most out of the interviews with director René Laloux, a disheveled Santa bear and diehard Marxist. He actually got his start doing art therapy at a psychiatric clinic in Loir-et-Cher, which led to creating animated shorts incorporating the patients' own artwork.
I'm kind of at a loss about what to watch next. Apparently Laloux went to to create a film together with Mœbius, but as per usual, it's not available on NetFlix. As I was complaining to
monshu the other night, nothing ever makes the jump from "Saved (Availability unknown)" to the queue. It really functions more as as a reminder to me of cool foreign films I've heard about that someday, when the politics of film distribution finally catch up to the technology of it, I might actually be able to order from somebody.Tags: