August 23, 2009
This is perhaps the very strangest movie that I have ever seen! The vast majority of the storyline comes thru in terms of the animation. I would say that perhaps 20% (20% max!!) of the of the storyline came thru in terms of the conversations that actually took place between the characters, which was particularly aggravating! Tho there was not many of them, the subtitles were amongst the very worst structured subtitles that I have ever seen structured on ANY movie! When a film has words with white colored letters on a yellow & white background and they barely stay up on the screen long enough to read them (Even if the words weren't nearly invisible they didn't stay up on the screen long enough!) ...and you are sitting there trying to read those words, ya know ...to follow what the characters are saying to one another (Psst! Kinda makes it easier to enjoy the movie!!) and perhaps even understand what's going on, you may very well find yourself cursing the filmmaker responsible for such a blunder......
Perhaps bc there was so little conversation between the characters, & therefore so few subtitles, that's not even the worse aspect of this movie! The musical score for this movie is clearly THE WORST part about this movie bc it thoroughly dominates every, or virtually every, scene! Some parts of the music actually did compliment the scenery and the action of the film but, it became so unendingly tedious & redundant that I began to wonder if I was going to finish watching this movie... I would much rather have the music be largely dumped, the subtitles completely taken out, and the speaking roles be taken up by ppl that can actually speak English well! And if the subtitles were to be kept (Although the movie should have been made this way to begin with, even if they were to remake this movie...) definitely structure the subtitles so that they can be read properly, for cryin' out loud! Redoing the musical score so that it doesn't facilitate migraine headaches in those susceptible to them would definitely go a long way also.
Now, with that said, if I didn't like this movie so much WTF did I give it a favorable 3 1/2 stars!!? The animation, although substandard by todays best animation, is actually quite good. They did the animation quite well in terms of what the movie needed to display in terms of the storyline. And in some sense that sort of does save it bc of those damned subtitles & no emotional reaction from the characters that you can actually hear. Tho, they obviously were not trying to acquire the Oscar for "Best Animation"! And I found the story to be a thorough head-trip, interesting, compelling, and aggravating all at the same time. Basically, it is about two different sentient species trying to live together on a world where animosity & bigotry between these two species runs high!!
I read somewhere that this movie may have more than one version to it, just like Light Years (Gandahar) which had an American version (Script by Isaac Asimov) and a European version (A script by someone else!); I am forced to wonder if that's true and what version I saw... Fantastic Planet is a movie that doesn't explain things! Like Donnie Darko or Lost Highway, or any movie that doesn't explain "WTF is going on??", or "WTF did that just happen!??", you just have to sit back and enjoy, whether you contemplate the meaning of it or not. This is made all the more aggravating with Fantastic Planet bc of the music and the subtitles which do quite a bit of damage to this film; definitively, ones ability to enjoy this film is for me a big problem. I admit that I will probably rewatch it, perhaps a number of times, to reassess my rating on this movie. I enjoyed this movie and I am glad that I watched but, I don't know how much I honestly enjoyed it....
