Toshio Matsumoto’s FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES and René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET coming August 21s

A big thank you to Jasper Sharp from Midnight Eye for offering up his thoughts on these coming UK releases ...

August 21st sees UK distributor Eureka expanding their laudable Masters of Cinema series with two new eagerly-anticipated DVD releases. First up is Toshio Matsumoto’s portrait of Tokyo’s swinging underground scene of the 60s – replete with transvestites and other assorted hedonists – Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara No Soretsu, 1969), which amazingly, given its reputation and its presence in all the major studies of Japanese cinema of the period, is the first time the film has ever been made available on any home video format outside of Japan. Extras include a 30-minute video interview + full length commentary with the director and essays from musician Jim O’Rourke and the University of Vienna’s Roland Domenig, who was responsible for organising an exhaustive retrospective of the works of the Arts Theatre Guild organisation that originally produced and distributed the film (along with others by directors such as Shinoda and Oshima).

For me however, even more exciting is the UK debut on DVD of René Laloux’s psychedelic animated sci-fi, Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), representing the first time the company have dipped their toes into the animation pool with their Master’s of Cinema series – refreshing to see someone out there with the belief that animators are just as eligible for cinéastic canonisation as their live-action counterparts. There’s been a general tragic dearth of DVD releases of non-American or non-Japanese animation recently, and if anything Laloux’s 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winner serves to remind us of a rich tradition in European animation that bridges the gap between these two extremes.

It’s become almost de rigeur to cite Hayao Miyazaki’s seal of approval on any slightly off-centre animated release in recent years, but the claim on the publicity blurb that this adaptation of Stefan Wul’s novel ‘Oms en série’ “can be seen to prefigure much of the work” of the director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away seems pretty apt in this case. It’s easy to spot more than a passing resemblance between this film’s depiction of two warring races battling it out in a hallucinogenic alien landscape of bizarre vegetation and strange buildings with that of Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

The story charts the hostilities between the blue-skinned, red-eyed, web-eared Draags and the more traditionally humanoid but miniscule Oms (Nausicaa featured ‘Ohms’!) with whom they share an antagonistic existence on the same planet of Ygam. One of the Om’s is plucked from his mother’s bosom as a baby by Draag girl Tiwa, re-christened Terr and raised as a pet. Tiwa is an indulgent keeper to Terr, nurturing him to adulthood and pumping him full of knowledge from the Draag’s shared information pool. The other Draags however, are complete shits, in one scene tying the hair of two tiny Oms together and forcing them to fight to untangle themselves. But soon Tiwa too becomes bored with her new plaything, allowing Terr to escape into the wild and share his knowledge with a tribe of wild Oms. But by this time the Draag’s are stepping up their plans to begin the merciless process of ‘de-omisation’ and rid the planet of their verminous competitors.

Blessed with an all-pervading psychotropic atmosphere and a lovely trippy soundtrack in the vein of Gallic retro-boppers Air, Fantastic Planet whisks you right back to the early 70s. I hesitate to use the word ‘surreal’, because it has become so dulled by overuse as to become almost meaningless, but if there was an animated work that warranted such a label, it is this one. Be warned though - the drug-inspired and often highly sexualised designs complete with images of bare-breasted aliens will probably deter the more Victorian-minded from presenting this to their pre-teens as a Disney substitute. This is definitely one to be filed under the category of “adult art animation”.

That said, it is also doubtful whether most modern-day adults will pick up on the underlying metaphor. The humanoid ‘Oms’ (‘hommes’ - mankind) and the domineering Draags (‘Drogues’ – drugs) were regarded at the time as a allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslavakia. The film was in fact French-Czech co-production made at Jiri Trnka’s studios in Prague (where the Japanese stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto also served an apprenticeship earlier in the decade - in fact Laloux’s film bears a similarity in ambience and design to Kawamoto’s collage animation The Trip / Tabi, which also critiqued the Soviet invasion). In marked contrast to Kawamoto’s happy experiences in Prague however, the five years it took to complete Fantastic Planet were allegedly something of nightmare for the French director, who was almost ousted from the director’s chair by a Czech rival during the production.

All of this information, and a good deal more regarding Laloux’s background and that of his collaborator, the illustrator-musician-writer-filmmaker Roland Topor is contained in the exemplary 28-page booklet, as per usual for a Eureka release. Also included within the package are two further shorts by Laloux, his earlier cut-out animation Les Escargots and a really intriguing cel-animated piece created by the staff of Pyongyang animation studios in 1987 entitled Comment Wang-Fo fut sauvé.

All told, having gorged myself on the contents of this beautiful disk several times now, I am left with an overwhelming appetite to see more of Laloux’s mesmerizing work in the animation field. His 1988 feature Gandahar sounds really intriguing… Anyone at Eureka listening?

Links:

Fantastic Planet (Eureka homepage)
Fantastic Planet (imdb)
Fantastic Planet at Amazon

Funeral Parade of Roses (Eureka homepage)
Funeral Parade of Roses (imdb)
Funeral Parade of Roses at Amazon

Text by Jasper Sharp.