This short film is included with the recent DVD rerelease of Fantastic Planet, and I have to say I like it a bit better than the feature. Laloux's earlier short is a lot less politically oriented, a lot less sensical, but because of those aspects a lot more surreal and psychedelically wonderful.
A farmer can't get his crops to grow until he discovers that they absolutely flourish under his tears. Utilizing a series of devices to ensure he can cry all over the field, he raises the plants to gigantic proportions. But just like Jack and the Beanstalk, gigantic proportions of food also equate gigantic proportions of pests, and snails eat their way through the crops until they go on a King Kong-like rampage of a nearby city, seducing pretty girls and destroying entire buildings at the same time. Once recovered from the attack, the farmer goes back and tries growing carrots this time. Which means rabbits.
The same style of animation is used here as in the later Fantastic Planet. Warm colors and colored pencil shadings create a form of cut-out animation (think South Park, but a little better at hiding the process) and character design. The focus of the feature is the snails, of course, and that's a brilliant way to keep it cheap because, well, they're snails... they don't exactly have many different ways of portraying them.
--PolarisDiB
A farmer can't get his crops to grow until he discovers that they absolutely flourish under his tears. Utilizing a series of devices to ensure he can cry all over the field, he raises the plants to gigantic proportions. But just like Jack and the Beanstalk, gigantic proportions of food also equate gigantic proportions of pests, and snails eat their way through the crops until they go on a King Kong-like rampage of a nearby city, seducing pretty girls and destroying entire buildings at the same time. Once recovered from the attack, the farmer goes back and tries growing carrots this time. Which means rabbits.
The same style of animation is used here as in the later Fantastic Planet. Warm colors and colored pencil shadings create a form of cut-out animation (think South Park, but a little better at hiding the process) and character design. The focus of the feature is the snails, of course, and that's a brilliant way to keep it cheap because, well, they're snails... they don't exactly have many different ways of portraying them.
--PolarisDiB