Fantastic Planet (1973)

Fantastic Planet (1973), direct by René Laloux.

Aka La planète sauvage.

Another entry in the "humans on the planet of large blue aliens" genre. Everything old is new again.

It's very strange and very French. The Traags employ scarcely comprehensible technology and do group meditation which sends their minds into different dimensions. The humans are lilliputian in size; some are kept as pets while most are feral. Our hero escapes captivity, takes a Traag teaching machine with him and joins a wild tribe. After overcoming superstition and tribal warfare the humans learn to build spacecraft and escape to a new satellite.

The film uses some fine drawing, although the animation is that sort where less effort went into presenting realistic motion. Bizarrely, no matter how alien and exotic the terrain and vegetation, even in French animated SF films, when the sex starts the soundtrack brings in the saxophones. When did we become conditioned that "sax" = "sex"? Is that a 1950s thing?

In another surreal aspect, the minds of the Traag, enclosed in crystal spheres, travel to their moon and become attached to gigantic headless marble statues where they commune, dance and perform "nuptial rights" with visiting minds from other galaxies. This is odd because the statues are of naked men and women, and neither the Traag nor (presumably) their visitors are human.

71 minutes long.