The Artist of Fantastic Planet’s Fantastic Dog

Scroll down to the video, we have to get you in the right mood for this:

What you just saw was the trailer for “Fantastic Planet,” a film Rolling Stone ranked the 36th greatest animated movie ever made. This is no small thing when one considers that the ranking was made in 2016, and the movie was made over 40 years before. Think of all the animated movies that were made in-between.

Though the movie was created in the after blush of the turbulent 60s, its compelling statement against conformity and violence was still ahead of its time. Much of the visual success of the movie was the eerie, surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor, a French illustrator, cartoonist, comics artist, painter, novelist, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor (whew!), what history would call a “polymath” (look it up). 

From the visuals of the film, a student of fine art would quickly spot that Topor was a Dadaist. Not surprisingly then, he said, “Everybody should be freer than they are.” It seems fitting to us, then, that his dog was a Jack Russell Terrier, the original originalist.

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