Upon the 50th anniversary of the release of La planète sauvage, we look back at the rebirth of a cult classic of both cinema and soundtracks.
The 1973 Cannes Film Festival came at a peculiar time for France. Whereas on the other side of the Alps, neighbouring Italy was fine tuning its Molotov cocktails and getting ready for a crescendo of social tension and political violence, France – in its best revolutionary tradition – seemed to have slipped back into calm. Following the incendiary season of 1968, the 1973 Cannes Film Festival took place just a few months after the elections that, following the victory of Pierre Messmer, marked a return to a more traditional and conservative form of Gaullism. For the country, all the attempts for a renewed social dialogue promoted by former cabinet leader and left-wing Gaullist Jacques Chaban-Delmas seemed to have been wiped out.
The film festival indeed seemed to mirror such an atmosphere of ancien régime. One of the winning films was The Hireling, a British drama by Alan Bridges about a chauffeur who falls in love with the aristocratic woman he drives around and based on a 1957 novel by L.P. Hartley.
An apparently insignificant detail that, however, established a silver lining with another film running for the Palme d’Or, a total underdog. Directed by René Laloux it was the first animation film to be screened at the revered festival: it went under the international title of Fantastic Planet, or the more familiar French one of La planète sauvage. This flick too was based upon a novel written in 1957, Oms en série (Men in series) by Stefan Wul.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
Tripping on the French riviera
Whether one was a rather traditional novel, the other was a sci-fi trip about a planet inhabited by giant humanoid aliens who see humans as their animals. A rather visionary and profound tale which by the early 1970s, in the wake of new philosophical, political and ethical themes brought up by the counterculture, seemed to have acquired a meaning anew or, perhaps, the be finally understood.
The animation work went hand in hand with the illustrations by Roland Topor which took Cannes by storm in a whirlwind of trippy shades of blue and red, in what for the bourgeois French riviera stood as a psychedelic awakening. One that went hand in hand with another equally lysergic and divisive film: The Holy Mountain by Alexander Jodorowski which also premiered at Cannes.
Topor’s drawing no doubt contributed to bag the film the Special Award, a prize that suited the difficulty to pinpoint the oeuvre. La planète sauvage, in fact, wasn’t your typical animation film. As a matter of fact, its soundtrack composed by Alain Goraguer certainly wasn’t what you’d expect from a cartoon.
Rich in psychedelic motifs and pioneering electronica, the score stands as a manifesto of experimental music. Unlike the many soundtracks that outlive the movies they were recorded for, it became ingrained in popular culture as a timeless piece of avant-garde equally like Laloux’s film.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
The making-of a cult
Proving the uniqueness of these compositions, is the fact that Laloux refused to have Goraguer working on the score as the film was made. A process totally conflicting with the standard for animation films for which, at least as a demo, the music is recorded upstream so that the flow of the drawings can be modelled on the score’s rhythm and tempo.
In the case of La planète sauvage, Goraguer was called in at the very end. Five years of talking about the opus abruptly resolved in three weeks only to conceive its original music.
“I knew the project was in production,” he confesses today, “and that it had been through a million twists and turns. But Laloux didn’t give up, he called me regularly to say: ‘You’ll start writing the music in three months!’ I heard this for five years…Then one winter’s day in 1972-73, another phone call. This time there wasn’t a second to lose: the mixing was due to start two months later.”
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
Such was the musical destiny of La planète sauvage: five years of waiting and procrastination crowned by a brusque final acceleration. Upstream, Goraguer had time to soak up Topor’s phantasmagorical drawings, to immerse himself in the screenplay, to get the measure of its full dimension, that of a philosophical tale. Still, discovering the edited film came like a revelation to him. “It was a shock”, he admits. “The dramatic impact of the colour, the blue of the Draags, the red of their eyes. What also struck me was the animation itself, the way the characters moved, humans or Draags. This permanent slow motion inspired in me the haunting theme which forms the foundations of the score.”
An extremely melodic theme, like an arpeggio, with the four opening notes that resonate like a miniature dies irae, points out Stèphane Larouge, who curated CAM Sugar’s 50th anniversary reissue of the score. “Goraguer would then inflect this theme, in different variations throughout the whole soundtrack, at times with timbres blended in naive poetry (clavinet, recorder), at times in more grandiose way, including a mixed eight-voice choir for the ending.
“In an era when neither Internet nor home videos existed, Goraguer wrote his score at home, cut off from Laloux’s and Topor’s images, merely from memory. Which drove him to compose as if it were a live film, with deep, adult, mature writing, far, very far from certain musical conventions associated with animations.”
Written in record time, the soundtrack of La planète sauvage was recorded with the same diligence, at the Davout Studio, from 8 to 10 March 1973, in three days and five sessions, four as an eight-piece combo, only one with an extended string section with a total of twenty-six musicians. Laloux, delighted, discovered the ultimate element that would complete and sublimate a work that had been so chaotic to produce, would homogenise the whole, give it an even more elevated dimension, and transform the individual trajectories of the characters into a pacifist epic.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
Hip Hop’s favourite soundtrack
“For me, it’s a children’s film… but a film they’d have no need to be embarrassed about as adults,” once stated director Laloux. His words now sound as a testament, since over the years this hypnotic and at traits funky, yet sublimely pop, masterpiece kept on living, rediscovered generation after generation by artists and musicians who have made it a staple of their compositions.
Hip Hop, above all, is the genre that contributed to revisiting and updating the legacy of both the film and the score. It all started in the 1990s, a time when home video made niche and seemingly lost treasures of international cinema accessible again. But also a time when popular culture started to look back to the underground culture of the 1960s and 1970s in a mixture of retromaniac nostalgia and trippy awe. Blaxploitation scores started being heavily employed for Hip Hop beats, and as a consequence also did European library music albums and OSTs.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
Whether in 1998 Boomerang by Big Pun was possibly the first track to sample the Goraguer’s opus, it was Madlib to consecrate it as a generational staple only a couple years after. When in 2000 the album The Unseen by his side project Quasimoto came out, not only it was a sampling bible that was also included in the soundtrack of the popular computer game Tony Hawk’s Underground, but it featured Come On Feet, a loopy and magnetic track that contained a sample of Le bracelet.
It was more than just a song, it was the beginning of a rediscovery. The album had in fact been conceived while Madlib was experimenting with mushrooms, resulting in a trippy and lysergic experience that mirrored – including in the video for the song – the iconography first mapped by Topor and, therefore, conceptually promoted the entire oeuvre as a new classic.
The path was hence established for other Rap legends to come, including J Dilla, Mac Miller, Rick Ross, DJ Shadow, Run the Jewels, Flying Lotus and Hocus Pocus, who over the years drew beats and inspiration from the soundtrack. It’s impossible not to recall the portrait of MF Doom standing next to a framed illustration from the film. The same image was used to communicate on social media the death of the artist, highlighting the relevance this once obscure French film and its music had on the career of the Hip Hop great.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
A classic reborn
However, the legacy of La planète sauvage now spans well beyond Hip Hop, touching upon contemporary music with bands such as Vanishing Twin and Stealing Sheep who tributed and reworked its score with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, or fashion houses like 404 Studio, which dedicated its 2021 collection La Planète Est Sauvage to the film, as well as the capsule by Études for AW21.
Proof that the music for La planète sauvage is a treasure that keeps on giving is the recent discovery of 7 unreleased cuts and 3 alt takes, an archive find that comes straight from the soundtrack’s original master tapes.
La planète sauvage, 1973. Original illustration by Roland Topor.
A momentum that required an apt celebration, which led us to release a 50th anniversary version of the soundtrack. For the occasion Patrick Goraguer, Alain’s son, worked on a new mix.The outcome is the first and most complete issue of the score to date. Four sides of hypnotic, vanguard music that still sounds as fresh as the day it was first taped.
La planète sauvage (Remastered 2023) by Alain Goraguer is now out on Gatefold 2LP, CD and digital. Find it on camsugarmusic.com
