Original title: La planète sauvage

René Laloux was one of French animation’s finest exponents. Between 1957 and 1987, he made a string of acclaimed and innovative short animations and three feature films, the first of which was this extraordinary adaptation of the 1957 novel Oms en série by Stefan Wul (a pseudonym for Pierre Pairault), made in collaboration with illustrator and comic artist Roland Topor – the two had worked together on the short films Les temps morts/The Dead Times (1964) and Les escargots/The Snails (1965). Fantastic Planet was released to great critical acclaim and has remained a milestone in the animation, Rolling Stone magazine ranking it the 36th best animated film of all time in 2016.

The story owes something to the Biblical tale of Moses and his leading the Israelites to the promised land. On the planet Ygam, the blue humanoid Draags (Traags in the English language version) practise transcendental meditation and seek enlightenment while keeping the diminutive Oms (a word chosen to recall both the French “homme” or “Man” and the “aum” or “om” of eastern mysticism) as pets. The Draags treat the Oms like animals, tolerant of them if they behave in their homes but authorising mass exterminations if their wild populations become a menace. The film opens with an Om mother being killed by the teasing of three Traag children and her orphaned son being adopted by Tiwa (Jennifer Drake in the original French version, Cynthia Adler in the English translation), the daughter of a prominent Draag leader. Tiwa names the boy Terr (Eric Baugin/Mark Gruner) – after Terra perhaps, the Latin word for Earth – and raises him to adulthood, controlling his movements with a special collar. She takes Terr to her education sessions, unaware that a fault in his collar is allowing him to learn the same lessons as her. When the teenage Tiwa loses interest in Terr (now voiced by Jean Valmont/Barry Bostwick), he escapes and flees into the wilderness where he falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in an abandoned Draag amusement park. Terr teaches them to use the headset he stole from Tiwa to obtain knowledge. When the Draags decide to exterminate the Oms living in the park, Terr leads a group to an abandoned Draag rocket depot. Years later they are able to build their own spaceships, planning to flee Ygam for its moon, the eponymous Fantastic Planet, where the Draag’s consciousnesses travel to while they meditate.

The story may be fairly straightforward and the characters thin, but that’s beside the point. Laloux and Topor (who contributed the film’s startling production design) were more interested in atmosphere and aesthetics than narrative, in making a film of big ideas rather and the results are extraordinary. The animation may not be the most fluid, but the visuals are gorgeous, trippy and hypnotic, the look of the film owing something perhaps to the influential French adult science fiction comic book Metal Hurlant.

The world of the Oms and the Draags is a fascinatingly alien place, a genuinely odd environment that feels and looks like nothing else ever attempted in film. Ygam is a terrifying place full of diverse biomes and grotesque creatures at odds with the serenity of the Draags’ obsession with meditation and transcendence. As Laloux and Topor lead us around Ygam, we’re witness to all manner of strange and unsettling sights – naturally growing crystals that shatter when Terr whistles, the surreal sight of the Draags’ disembodied consciousness arriving on the Fantastic Planet to settle on the bodies of headless statues, or the savage wildlife that preys on itself in the various environments encountered by Ter on his travels. It’s a richly imagined world, distinctive and unique. Indeed one often feels as if the film as a whole is an exercise in world-building rather than of simple storytelling.

That the film is a hangover from the rebellious counterculture of the late 1960s is evident not only in the psychedelia of the imagery but in Alain Goraguer eclectic soundtrack that mixes waltzes with Pink Floyd-like instrumental passages, jazz-funk with electronics to create a suitable dreamy soundscape that has been sampled many times over the intervening years. Elsewhere both the Oms and Draags indulge in drugs of various kinds which seems only appropriate under the circumstances. The (youthful) Oms finally rising up against the (establishment) Draags to demand better treatment (as in the book, the film is largely an allegory for basic human and animal rights) would still have struck a resonant chord with those die-hards still clinging to the dead hippie dream in 1973.

The film itself fell afoul of the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s. It took many years to get the film to the screen, production starting in 1967 and almost being scuppered by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia – when the animation work was being carried out at the famous Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague – in 1968. There was some doubt that production would get going again (in the aftermath of the invasion, the new Soviet authorities supressed several films with supposed allegorical leanings) but production resumed again in 1969, though it would take another four years to complete.

For all their supposed intellectual and spiritual superiority, the Drags are capable of acts of great callousness and cruelty. They have no interest in whether or not the Oms are intelligent, merely seeing them either as a pet or as vermin that needs to be exterminated. It’s a cruelty largely born of indifference – the Oms are tolerated so long as their populations don’t become an issue but no attempt is ever made by the Draags to seriously study them or to understand them. Eventually, there’s a meeting of minds and a balance of sorts is struck, making it one of the more optimistic of the pre-Star Wars (1977) 1970s science fiction films, which tended to take a bleaker view of the future.

There’s much about Fantastic Planet that inevitably feels of its time but it’s also a remarkably powerful film that still feels eerie, truly otherworldly in a way that few other animations even attempt. Even if the allegory isn’t to your taste, the eye-popping visuals, eccentric soundtrack and beautifully realised world in which it all plays out will still take your breath away. It was the first animated film to take home the Grand Prix special jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.