1973: FANTASTIC PLANET

What’s it about?

On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.

Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.




Is it any good?

Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.

It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.

The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.




But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.

Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.

But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.




What else happened this year?

-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce.
-- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle.
-- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors.
-- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs.
-- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests.
-- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick.
-- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else.
-- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...

SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.

1966: FANTASTIC VOYAGE

What’s it about?

When an assassination attempt sends a Russian defector with important defense secrets into a coma, the American government decides to shrink a team of surgeons down to microbial size so they can repair the damage from the inside. The plan calls for injecting a submarine carrying five-person team (including Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch) into the carotid artery for a relatively short jaunt to the affected area of the brain.

Things, however, immediately go wrong when the submarine is swept down a whirlpool of blood into the venous system and starts heading towards the heart. Still hoping to complete their mission, the team must now traverse the perils of the heart, the lungs, the lymphatic system, and the inner ear before arriving at the brain. And the probable presence of a saboteur on board only adds to the danger.




Is it any good?

There’s a part of me that wants to hail FANTASTIC VOYAGE as something like a culmination of the ambitions of sci-fi movies from the previous two decades. I don’t think the case for that kind of claim is foolproof -- there’s another part of me, after all, that recognizes it is a movie with a lot of flaws. But even though FANTASTIC VOYAGE is perhaps not exactly pioneering, it does feel to me like a big incremental step forward for the genre.

It would be nice if I could point to some particular element as the obvious keystone to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there really is one. Instead, I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is really more about the shortcomings of the movies that came before it. Take DESTINATION MOON (1950), for instance. That movie stood out at the time because it combined a dramatic speculative vision with the budget needed to achieve it and a willingness to take the material seriously. But the science and special effects upstaged the plot and characters, and the story itself is just never satisfying. THE SILENT STAR (1960), by contrast, had the vision and spectacle, the willingness to treat sci-fi seriously, and a pretty good story -- but it lacked the budget and talent to really bring them to life. Again and again, most sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to fall short in one category or another. ON THE BEACH (1959) lacks a clear or compelling vision, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) don’t take their science or their audiences seriously, and a whole host of movies fall prey to low budgets, short production times, or inexperienced cast and crew.




One part of my argument is that FANTASTIC VOYAGE succeeds (more or less) on every meaningful metric that I would use to rate a sci-fi movie. It has an compelling speculative vision that is really pretty unique. It has the budget to convincingly create a weird and alien world full of imaginative spectacle. It has an exciting story and a talented cast that makes it believable enough. And it has a real interest in science, a respect for accuracy, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond the bounds of the knowable world.

If I took half an hour to think about it, I could probably come up with a short list of six or seven sci-fi movies from 1966 and earlier that arguably meet all of those criteria just as well as FANTASTIC VOYAGE does. But I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is that it succeeds while swinging for the fences -- it envisions a story on an epic scale, and mostly delivers what it promises without losing sight of the elements that make a good movie. This isn’t a black and white B-movie set mostly in an ordinary American town with a slow-building sci-fi premise. It’s an all out full color adventure that takes place largely in a world that none of us will ever see except on TV and movie screens. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to those quieter, less flashy movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). The fact they are a less ambitious doesn’t make them any less enjoyable -- just less likely to create as big of a splash.




I also don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think FANTASTIC VOYAGE is a perfect movie. It’s got its share of flaws as well. The weakest link is probably the story, which exists entirely as a mechanism for first getting the surgical team from one bodily attraction to another. Even accepting that surgery via miniaturized submarine is the best option for this particular patient, there’s no reason that the operation in question should take the team through the heart, the lungs, and most of the other stops they make. So the story is mostly just a string of accidents that each justify the next stop on the journey. Yet, it’s all believable enough and certainly makes for a more exciting trip than there might otherwise have been.

I don’t want to spend too much time picking nits though. The acting is good, the submarine is neat, and the special effects are pretty effective. I had thought that at least some of the special effects were the result of miniature photography of real cells. But that’s not the case -- every special effect (from red blood cells to the chambers of the heart to alveoli to antibodies) are recreated at a giant size so they can be photographed with the models and actors. The fantastic voyage does eventually start to feel a bit like “the greatest hits of health class”, but even so there’s something undeniably interesting about a (seemingly fairly accurate) journey through the human body. And as far as cinematic images go, the sight of Donald Pleasance being eaten by a white corpuscle is one that sticks with you for decades.



What else happened this year?

-- John Frankenheimer directed SECONDS, in which an old man is given a chance for rejuvenation in the body of a relatively young (but still incredibly square) Rock Hudson. But when it turns out that he has just as little control over his new life as his old one, he starts trying to break out.
-- Francois Truffaut’s directed a surprisingly good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. The movie improves a bit on the novel as far as pacing and character interest goes, but it’s probably still all too allegorical for its own good. Julie Christie co-stars in Truffaut’s only English-language movie.
-- A man gets an experimental lifelike mask to cover up his disfigured face in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. But when he uses his new identity to anonymously seduce his own wife, the experiment starts to go awry.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1966...

I was all ready to recommend FAHRENHEIT 451, but I think after writing this entry I talked myself into going with FANTASTIC VOYAGE as the best movie of the year. As I said earlier, it’s a big incremental jump for the genre -- and it seems like an important stepping stone on the way to some of the true classics that arrived a couple years later.

BONUS BLOG -- 1965: SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH

What’s it about?

An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.

The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.




Is it any good?

Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.

The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)




The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.

Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.



But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.



So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.

Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.

1957: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

What’s it about?

While cruising the ocean in his brother’s yacht, a man is exposed to a strange shimmering mist. The event doesn’t seem to have any ill effects at first, but six months later the man suspects he is getting smaller when his clothes no longer seem to fit. After several trips to the doctor, a set of X-ray photographs prove that he’s not just losing weight but is in fact gradually shrinking. Eventually the man reaches a height of about three feet -- at which point his doctors discover a method of arresting the shrinking, but still no way to reverse it.

Treated like a freak and hounded by the media, the man and his wife stay confined in their home where their nerves soon fray. The man finds brief solace in the friendship of another little person, but soon discovers that he is shrinking again despite his treatments. Ultimately reduced to a height of just a couple inches, disaster strikes one day when the family cat chases and traps him in the basement. His wife believes he’s been killed, and the man soon finds himself faced with several seemingly insurmountable challenges -- supply himself with the necessities of life, evade a monstrous spider, and contact the others in the house to let them know he still lives. And all the while, he continues to grow smaller and smaller.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

I knew that this would be my kind of movie as soon as the jazzy, hip opening credits started to roll. (Pro tip: Jazzy, hip opening credits are always a good sign.) And when I realized just minutes later that the main character isn’t any kind of scientist -- well, that was just the icing on the cake. Until I started watching a lot of 1950s sci-fi flicks all in a row, it had never registered just how many of them have scientists for main characters. Movies with scientist protagonists tend to be largely about the heroic leads trying desperately to solve whatever fantastic problem they’re facing with the vigorous application of (more or less ridiculous) science. But since the hero here, played by Grant Williams, isn’t a scientific person at all, it shifts the focus of the movie from problem-solving to simply coping with a strange condition and then eventually to surviving in an weird and hostile world. It’s a much easier kind of story for me to relate to, and the fact that it was different from most of the other movies I’ve been watching is a bonus as well.




The first half of the movie follows the shrinking man as he incredibly diminishes in size. This is taken in a few stages, and there’s a long interlude where he’s about three feet tall (the height at which his shrinking is temporarily arrested) that’s full of terrific over-sized props. Everything looks very realistic, and the movie never tries to play the difference in scale for laughs. Don’t get me wrong -- it’s always funny when a tiny man talks into a giant telephone, but the movie does its best to show the horror and humiliation of the situation rather than just the absurdity. This is also the section where Grant Williams is the least likeable -- he’s self-pitying, jealous, paranoid, angry, petulant, and frightened. Afraid to leave his house, he pouts and seethes and is pretty believably unpleasant.

It’s not until he’s left entirely to his own resources to survive in the basement that the shrinking man really starts to show his heroic side. Reduced to only a couple inches in height, ordinary tasks (like climbing the stairs back up to the first floor) become impossible. But he quickly finds a hitherto untapped resourcefulness that lets him claw his way -- ever so briefly -- to the top of the basement food chain. The only real weakness of this part of the movie is the melodramatic first-person narration that crops up from time to time. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson (based on an earlier novel of his own), and the blame for the purple prose no doubt falls on his shoulders. I’d almost say that the narration ought to have been cut entirely, but it does help to reinforce the ultimate desolation of Grant Williams’s situation -- even as he surmounts the challenges of the basement, he continues to shrink all the time and even problems he’s already solved grow continually more difficult. And, of course, even being reunited with his wife won’t be more than a temporary happy ending since he’s quickly approaching a size at which he’ll be too small even to communicate with other humans. Consequently, the ultimate ending is surprisingly uncertain -- not the only ambiguous ending in the annals of 1950s sci-fi, but one of the few.




What else happened this year?

-- 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH is probably the best movie of the decade to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion effects. This one follows an alien from Venus that starts out tiny and cute, but quickly grows to a frightening size, goes on a rampage and then climbs a famous urban landmark.
-- THE MONOLITH MONSTERS is another Grant Williams picture that casts him in the more typical role of a geologist trying to solve an extraordinary problem. But, uncommon for the 1950s, the challenges he faces are not actually monsters at all but simply forces of nature that are running out of control.
-- Hammer Studios officially took over Universal’s monster franchises with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Starring Peter Cushing as the Baron Frankenstein, it helped set the course Hammer would follow for the next several decades.
-- Peter Cushing also stars in Hammer’s THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, about a Himalayan expedition dangerously beset both by personality conflicts and by psychic Yeti.
-- Willis O’Brien, the other great stop-motion animator of the time, lends his talents to THE BLACK SCORPION, a decidedly low budget entry in the giant monster sub-genre.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1957...

Make it THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.