Film

Fantastic Planet

A hallucinatory piece of 70s French animation where tiny humans are kept as pets by giant blue aliens who regard them as charming vermin. Told in Roland Topor's collage-like, faintly grotesque style and scored with woozy psychedelic jazz, it's less a story than a fever dream about scale, power and extermination. Slow, strange, and genuinely unforgettable — best watched patient, maybe a little stoned.

TMDb rating7.6

If you liked this

Planet of the Apes1968

The original species-swap parable, and it still lands harder than most remakes: humans as livestock, apes as civilisation, and a hierarchy just as casually cruel as the Draags'.

But The politics are broader and the pacing creakier than modern sci-fi; some of the effects show their age.

Planet of the Apes poster

Akira1988

Cyberpunk Tokyo rendered with the same hand-drawn density and body-horror strangeness that makes Fantastic Planet's world feel so alien — animation used to imagine, not just illustrate.

But The plot sprawls and the ending gets abstract fast; if you want tidy answers it will frustrate you.

Akira poster

District 92009

Aliens stuck in a slum, treated as vermin by the humans who should know better — the same cold anthropological eye Fantastic Planet turns on its Oms, filmed like a war zone.

But Shaky-cam docu-style shooting and sudden gore might jar if you came here for something more meditative.

District 9 poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

La Jetée1962

Made a decade before Fantastic Planet in the same French tradition of using science fiction as philosophy rather than spectacle — both trust silence and strange stillness to do the emotional work.

Told almost entirely in still photographs with a whispering narrator, this haunts you longer than films twice its length — a time-travel story about memory, loss and the end of the world.

But There's virtually no motion and no action; if you need images to move, this will feel like a slideshow.

La Jetée poster
More like this (8)

Watership Down1978

Proof animation aimed at children can still gut you — a small, hunted population fighting for survival against forces far bigger than themselves, told with real teeth.

But It's frequently mistaken for a kids' film and traumatises accordingly; the violence is sudden and the tone rarely lightens.

Watership Down poster

Heavy Metal1981

An anthology of pulpy, druggy, wildly imaginative science-fantasy segments — proof Fantastic Planet wasn't alone in treating animation as an adult playground for strange ideas.

But The segments vary wildly in quality and the tone leans campy-erotic rather than philosophical.

Heavy Metal poster

The Congress2013no page yet

Robin Wright plays a version of herself sold into a digital afterlife, and the film erupts into hallucinatory animation halfway through — a sharp, sad meditation on bodies and ownership.

But The tonal whiplash between live-action satire and animated fever dream isn't for everyone, and it drags in the middle.

Mad God2021no page yet

Phil Tippett's three-decade stop-motion nightmare descends through a rotting industrial underworld with barely a word of dialogue — grim, hand-crafted world-building at its strangest.

But There's almost no narrative to hold onto and the imagery is genuinely nightmarish; not a relaxing watch.

Wizards1977no page yet

Ralph Bakshi's post-apocalyptic fairy tale mashes rotoscoped war footage into hand-drawn fantasy, another 70s animator smuggling real ugliness under a children's-book surface.

But It's rougher and cheaper-looking than Bakshi's later work, and the pacing wanders.

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem2003no page yet

A wordless, candy-coloured space opera set entirely to Daft Punk's Discovery album — if you loved Fantastic Planet's trippy, near-silent storytelling, this scratches the same itch in a different key.

But There's no dialogue and barely any plot beyond the music-video conceit; it's mood over substance.

Baraka1992

Same wordless, painterly way of seeing life from outside itself — Fantastic Planet imagines an alien watching humans; Baraka is a camera doing the same thing to us, for real.

A wordless documentary, decades in the making, that drifts across humanity and nature with the same cosmic, slightly alien remove Fantastic Planet takes on its own species — gorgeous and unsettling.

But There's no narrative, no characters, no dialogue at all; it demands patience and a willingness to just look.

Baraka poster

Sorry to Bother You2018

Same underlying machine as Fantastic Planet — an underclass literally reshaped by the powerful for their convenience — repotted into corporate satire instead of interstellar allegory, played for laughs until it isn't.

A telemarketer discovers his 'white voice' can sell anything, and the satire escalates into full body-horror by the end — scabrous, funny, and genuinely upsetting about what exploited labour becomes.

But The swing from workplace comedy to full-on grotesque sci-fi in the third act isn't smoothly signposted; it can feel like two movies stitched together.

Sorry to Bother You poster

People

Cast

Directing

Writing

Production

Recommended by

Jodorowsky's Dune, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Yellow Submarine, Lilo & Stitch, Belladonna of Sadness