Paris, 1929, and a long way to the films

This reading reads René Laloux as a pioneer of animation, a director they credit with an experimental spirit, a philosophical message, and a poetic quality, and as one of the world’s three great animation masters — a ranking that stays as they give it. He was born in Paris on 13 July 1929 and died in 2004. He left school at thirteen and learned wood carving and drawing; at seventeen he trained as an actor; he was conscripted to Austria for a year and a half; and he worked in a bank, a real-estate lending office, a plastic-bag factory, and a psychiatric hospital.

What they find distinctive is a fantasy in which the familiar and the slightly grotesque sit together, and a habit of asking, through a rich imagination, what human nature is.

Dead Times, 1964: live action, drawings, an endless execution

Dead Times — Les temps morts — is, they write, a 1964 work that combines live-action film, photographs, drawings, and animation, with music and narration to strengthen the message. They keep lines from the film as they transcribed them: two feet move forward and back, two others are used to kill; respect and money are offered to the dead, while money is lent to the living; when human beings cannot be killed, things that resemble humans, and the living things nearby, are killed for pleasure; and a cycle runs on, in which decapitated bodies offer an executioner’s neck to another executioner.

Toward the end, as they quote it, comes a plea: God, forgive us above all for having been born human — and the answer, “I forgive you.” The film, in their reading, asks how cruel human beings are, and whether such people have a future at all. Fantasy, they add, is the making of an object that does not exist in reality, inside the senses of the mind; it is because reality exists that such an object can be made, and the unreal drawings sit beside realistic live action as one cut of something already happening in the world.

Fantastic Planet, 1973: Ygam, Oms, Draags

Fantastic Planet — La Planète sauvage, in the French title they record, a spelling they slightly miss and that is read as Planète — is a 1973 work, they write, Laloux’s first feature, based on a novel by Stefan Wul that they title Mass-Produced Humans. It was drawn by hand on paper over three and a half years. They see in it a giant-monster theme from The Snail joined to the formal beauty of Dead Times, and a surreal method that takes apart everyday relations and sets them down again, in order to think about what it is to be human.

On the unknown planet Ygam, small Oms and giant Draags are drawn as strange in body and in way of life; odd animal sounds are used as well, they add, to put a question about the human essence. Among other works they date are The Rat’s Teeth in 1960, The Snail in 1965, Time Masters in 1982, and Gandahar in 1987. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student reading of René Laloux, with a life dated 1929 to 2004, Dead Times in 1964, Fantastic Planet in 1973 after Stefan Wul, and the planet Ygam left as recorded in this reading.

Last updated: 15 November 2026