Forbidden Planet/ Fantastic Planet

FORBIDDEN PLANET, 1956, Warner Brothers, 98 min. Dir. Fred Wilcox. The movie that launched a thousand ships, from STAR TREK to STAR WARS. One of the most influential films ever made, the first big budget science fiction blockbuster is a space opera with its roots in Freud, Jung and Shakespeare. With Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Nielson (as the prototype for Captain Kirk) and the beautiful Anne Francis.

FANTASTIC PLANET (LA PLANETE SAUVAGE), 1973, Argos Films, 72 min. French director and animator Rene Laloux’s masterpiece is an astonishingly beautiful and otherworldly vision of a far-distant planet where humans are kept as pets by a race of gigantic, blue-skinned overlords called The Traags.