Mystery of the Third Planet (1981)

Originally titled Tayna tretyey planety and also known as Secret of the Third Planet, Roman Kachanov’s stunningly animated science fiction film is something of a cult phenomenon in its native Russia, though it’s less well known in the rest of the world. By turns psychedelic, unsettling, beautiful and baffling, it plays a little like a science fiction take on the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968) but even that comparison feels a little forced – it’s quite simply unlike any other science fiction film of the 1980s.

Running just 48 minutes, it’s based on Kir Bulychov’s 1974 novella Puteshestviye Alisy/Alisa’s Travels, one of a series of over 50 stories about the eponymous young girl and her adventures in a high tech future where time and space travel are commonplace. In the year 2181, Captain Zelyonyy (Green in the English dub), Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alisa are sent on an interplanetary mission to find alien animals for Moscow Zoo. Taking advice from the bizarre, multi-armed cyborg archaeologist Gromozeka, they seek out Dr Verkhovtsev, the director of the mysterious Museum of Two Captains, for advice. They wind up on the planet Bluk where they obtain a rare Chatterer bird, formerly the pet of missing space hero Captain Kim and are pursued by the sinister Merry Fellow Oo who tries to steal the bird. Finally, the make their way to the Jellyfish star system where they are captured by pirates before finding the missing Kim and his another missing adventurer, Captain Buran.

On the surface then it’s a standard space opera romp but it’s the presentation that makes Mystery of the Third Planet so special. Gloriously strange, it’s a richly animated tale full of offbeat details with characters who all have their own distinctive little quirks and idiosyncrasies. The future world is fully realised and the strange planets that the adventurers visit stocked with a variety of peculiar life forms, including a box-like alien on legs that communicates by changing colour, a diamond encrusted robot turtle and mirrored flowers that record and play back anything that passes in front of them.

The final planet that the trio arrive at, the eponymous third planet of the Jellyfish system, is one of the most beautifully realised alien planets you’ll ever see, a riot of colour, fascinating alien creatures and gorgeous landscapes. Producers Soyuzmultfilm clearly invested a lot of time (production took four years), resources and money into getting Mystery of the Third Planet just right, affording director Kachanov everything he needed to bring art director Natalya Orlova’s outstanding designs to life.

The visuals are accompanied by a weird, chilled-out part-orchestral, part-space rock, part-prog score by Aleksandr Zatsepin, a prolific composer for popular Russian films. For the most part, it complements the strangeness of the visuals rather nicely though at times, it can get a little over-powering and would have benefited from being mixed a bit lower. The English language version released in the States by Films by Jove (as Alice and the Mystery of the Third Planet with Kirsten Dunst and James Belushi among the voice cast) replaces Zatsepin’s score with generic synthesizer noodlings as well as altering the dialogue and cutting several scenes entirely. It’s best avoided and an earlier release, which seems to be making up its own story as it goes along, is an abomination.

The film has been available in many territories outside Russia for many years but it hasn’t quite captured the imagination of non-Russians quite the same way as it did back home. This is due largely to the fact that the series of Alisa stories are barely known in the rest of the world while in Russia they’ve been hugely popular since the first story appeared in 1965. Bulychev – the pen name adopted by Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheiko – was a prolific science fiction writer, creating several other series of novels and stand-alone adventures, only around half a dozen or so were ever translated into English. Puteshestviye Alisy was published in the West as Alice: The Girl from Earth in July 2002. As well as the books and short stories – which were still being published as late as 2003, the year of Bulychev’s death – there have been numerous other adaptations of the Alisa series, including video game spin-offs and the TV series Gostya iz budushchevo/Guest from the Future (1985), the films Lilac Ball (1987) and Ostrov rzhavogo generala/Island of Rusty General (1988) and the animations Uzniki «Yamagiri-maru»/Prisoners of Yamagiri-Maru (1988), Den’ rozhdeniya Alisy/Alice’s Birthday (2009) and Alisa znaet, shto delat!/Alisa Knows What to Do! (2013), the latter a 24 episode TV series.