Moebius took on Topor’s previous role as art director and graphic designer, which made the visual style more commercial, somewhat similar to the comic book style the French artist had initiated some years earlier with his comic strip Arzach. The scenes set in space disconcerted critics with their similarity to the mangas that had just begun to appear on French TV. The scenes on the planet are more reminiscent of the world of The Fantastic Planet, with its fantasmagoric imagination: fauna and strange vegetation, invasion by giant hornets, etc. Although the animation is uneven, a number of sequences are extremely impressive, and the Pannonia studios in Budapest made most of these.

With this film Laloux tried to bridge the two worlds of animation and the new French comic books, a laudable endeavour, but one that proved more difficult than anticipated. Since then, other filmmakers have tried to transpose the worlds of Moebius and Philippe Druillet to cinema; yet in retrospect the only film that stands up is Les maîtres du temps whose oddness, lighter in tone than in La planète sauvage remains however its main credentials.

The film achieved no more than critical success, but definitively established Laloux’s uniqueness: René Laloux... alone represents not only the whole of French science-fiction animation, but even now the only kind of French cinema’s science-fiction (Gérard Klein). This statement obviously predated the arrival of Enki Bilal and Luc Besson on the French cinema scene some years later. René Laloux made his third feature in1986-87; by which time he was approaching 60, and the film’s development process was very complicated since this time he opted to move all the animation work to Pyong Yang in North Korea.

Gandahar (1986-1987) was an adaptation of Jean Pierre Andrevon’s novel, Les hommes machine contre Gandhar. A paradisiacal world is threatened by a mysterious enemy, who turns out to be “metamorph,” a creature made of pure thought; the only way to counter its power is to manipulate time itself... a story which can obviously be seen as relating to the earlier work. Until then, lack of money had been compensated for, indeed sublimated by, a formal and storytelling ingenuity; here this no longer applies and the film lacks energy. Laloux seemed to be repeating himself, with less inspiration and more sweat: the traditional technique of painted cels once again shows its limitations, as it does whenever too much is demanded of it.

Perhaps the same film, made 10 years later using digital techniques would have been more satisfying for fans of that form of science fiction that is more kitsch than inspired; unable to count on Moebius’ collaboration, Laloux turned to another sci-fi illustrator, the Frenchman Philippe Caza. Laloux made a short film with the same crew in Pyong Yang (Comment Wang Fo fut sauvé, 1987, adapted from a short story by Marguerite Yourcenar) and was involved in various TV series projects and scripts, before devoting himself entirely to teaching in Angoulême.

Before he retired in 1999, he produced a highly personal take on the history of animation in the book Ces dessins qui bougent (Dreamland 1996). He also initiated les enfants de la pluie, an animated feature adapted from the French sci-fi writer Serge Brussolo, but in the end it was Philippe Leclercq, a former colleague, who directed the film, in 2002, on the basis of drawings by Philippe Caza.

In the early ‘80s, Laloux had discovered Japanese animation which was then undergoing a real boom. He had a deep admiration for Hayao Miyazaki and maintained IsaoTakahata’s Tombstone of the Fireflies to be a masterpiece, a judgement that has since been widely echoed. But at that time, in the early ‘90s, Laloux was one of only a small circle of admirers encouraging the introduction of films from the Ghibli studios in France. Which is greatly to his credit. Whether this admiration was reciprocated, we do not know, but in any case it would be fascinating to make a comparative analysis of the way time and atmosphere are handled by Miyazaki and Laloux... but that would be another article altogether.

Over the course of his career, Laloux worked with some of the most eminent representatives of French language science fiction, both in terms of literature and visual art. He has the audacity to believe in the potential of people who had hitherto been ignored by French cinema; and in doing so, he undoubtedly contributed to giving these writers’ works a second life. It is well known that Moebius went on to work on feature films, in the U.S. as well as in Japan. Laloux also made a huge gamble on using the artistic talents of countries in the east, without being coy about it.

Since the release of La planète sauvage, many French animators have dreamed of moving into feature films like him. Such dreams have taken a whole generation to become a reality.

Philippe Moins is a writer and teacher in Belgium, and also the co-director of Anima 2003.