Picture the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. Look there's Rene Laloux, director of the animated film La Planète Sauvage, amongst the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Paul Newman, Luigi Zampa and Francois Truffaut. Laloux is sitting next to his animator Roland Topor, with jazzman Alain Goraguer the other side. They're deep in conversation, discussing the award they've just been handed by Monsieur Bergman from the Cannes jury - the 'special jury prize'. Laloux aloofly tosses the trophy into the air and Topor draws this irrationality into a surrealist art form, infusing the image with humanist allegory; Goraguer pours into his prog-funk-psyche manual and composes a broody, jazzy mesh to mirror Topor's renderings. All devolve into dots and boxes and nonsensically designed animals.
That scene is almost entirely fictitious. But one can imagine Topor picturing the 'real' world along those lines. He and Laloux worked together on the story behind La Planète Sauvage which was based on the 1957 sci-fi novel of Stefan Wul. They conjure a rich and beautiful but dangerous world inhabited by intelligent blue beings called Traags who keep tiny humans, or 'Oms' (which sounds like a bastardisation of the French word for man - 'homme' - to me), as pets. The Traags are a vastly intelligent species who spend most of their time 'meditating', underestimating the little Oms who splinter off to form their own colonies in the wilds of rural areas. Led by Terr a former captive human who has a Traag education, these organised Oms mobilise themselves and become a threat to the Traags. Both species learn to live symbiotically thus avoiding war and mutual annihilation.
As I say it's a heavily allegorical picture with, I'm sure, political allusions and ontological theories of being referred to throughout - certainly the idea of two powers in opposition to each another seems like a pretty overt nod of the head to the Cold War, which was in full swing at time of making (or at least in a period of detente, what with the diplomatic thawing between Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev). There is an examination of how humanity deals with new and alien things: the reception Terr first receives by the when he joins the wild Oms tribe is decidedly suspicious because he has knowledge of the Traags' writing. One of the chiefs attempts to suppress, even assassinate, Terr in a desperate bid to retain leadership. It's a fascinating aside in the film; a caveat to the human psyche, selfish in-fighting and back-stabbing even in the face of a superior enemy.
But without being party to the ideologies of any of those involved, or indeed of being present at the time of conception or of release it would be foolish to speculate.On a purely visual level the artist Topor's visions are truly remarkable; he was demonstrably in possession of a unique imagination capable, not only of creating unorthodox eco-systems, but of instilling in them the personified qualities of humour and anger and curiosity. Each frame is resplendent in his vast unquantifiable creativity. It is a inventive scale almost matched by the music of Alain Goraguer. According to wikipedia he came from a jazz pianist background, a pal to the luminary Serge Gainsbourg, but in La Planète Sauvage he had demonstrably been keeping up with the developments in prog rock and German krautrock because many of the arrangements bask in wah-wah guitar and grooved bass-lines, not to mention surreal stylistic progression in keeping with the weird images of Topor. These arrangements tend to be lighter than the central theme which is broodier, more serious. With speech often at a minimum the music had to be prominent and able to stand resolutely by its self, yet compliment the oscillating moods of the pictures. Goraguer proved himself equal to that challenge; indeed the soundtrack has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance in recent years, with a vinyl re-release (D.C. Recordings I think).
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