rubenk-79499
The reviews for this animation were, as is so often the case on IMDB, wildly misleading for the most part. Which isn't usually a problem, unless it causes me and my wife to lose over an hour of our lives on what essentially looks like a film school project.Animation:
Call it ground breaking as much as you like, "not very jerky for its time" is the best one can objectively say about it. This title seems to suffer from the bigotry of low expectations, as people possibly only compare this to He-Man or other such animated children's shows of the period. However, we have to acknowledge that this same year Akira came out. Gentlemen, we had the technology. That the creators did not have the money or inclination to use that technology is on them.Art:
It's creative in some places, which is why I am generously giving it 3 stars instead of just 1. The initial scenes seem to have inspired the recent Valerian movie. The Deformed are interesting to see, and the sole redeeming aspect of the entire movie. The evil penis was just not scary nor intimidating.Music:
Monotonous, misplaced and combined horribly with the visuals. Where some animations use dramatic changes in music to compensate for lack of action, this movie inexplicably does the reverse: It manages to reduce any action to a sullen, unpunctuated plodding of the storyline. It would have been advisable for the soundtrack people to have actually watched the movie.Story:
An utterly flat sketch of a story, with horrid conversations that fail even in their attempt at being pretentious. Protagonist is told to go and investigate, uneventfully travels through time, laughably easily kills the evil penis.
Character development? There was absolutely nothing there to develop. I relate more to Papa Smurf than this protagonist.Conclusion:
After no more than 10 minutes I wanted my suffering to end, but my wife (a pox upon her!) kept hoping it would somehow pick up. It didn't. No claims against Weinstein have yet been proven in a court of law, but I insist that just for his part in releasing this movie he deserves many years behind bars.
wandereramor
It feels too easy to call Rene Laloux's animated movies "trippy", as if one can only appreciate them while on drugs. But there's a kind of weird dream logic mixed with hallucinogenic science fiction that Laloux, along with his collaborator Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seems to have mastered. Unfortunately, Gandahar was his last feature film, and not his best. But for animation buffs or fans of weird sci-fi, it's well worth a look.Gandahar uses a fairly straightforward, action-driven space opera plot line. It dramatizes the clash between nature and technology, perhaps in an over-literal way. Most of the above-mentioned weirdness comes from a race of misshapen seers that speak in impossible tenses, and a plot that requires time travel to a point which is simultaneously past and future. It's not convoluted, but it's impossible to understand just as actual time travel would be to our chronologically-limited minds. Oh, and there are lots of breasts, most of them belonging to blue people. Between that and the violence, Gandahar is certainly much less child-friendly than Laloux's other films.Gandahar isn't really original as a whole, although there's a lot of fun absurdities like giant crabs throwing rocks at armies of metal men. But it's a fun watch, with just enough weirdness to put it above the familiar repertoire of 1980s science fiction. If you're a fan of any of the artists mentioned above, this is a must-see. If you're not, maybe give Gandahar a chance anyway. Who knows, you might like it.
junk-monkey
Version watched: Gandahar - with English subtitles.I have a suspicion that most of the people who regard this film with such high esteem first saw it when they were kids and watch it now in a glow of happy nostalgia. Coming to it for the first time as a middle-aged man this film is a clumsily animated, ponderously slow, soporific bore; the much lauded 'truly alien' landscapes and animals are disappointingly dull compared with the lurid and fertile illustrations that filled the pages of the SF magazines I grew up reading in the Sixties and Seventies, and the story is very clichéd and thin. Which is a pity, because I came to Gandahar with fond childhood memories of René Laloux's 1967 film La planète sauvage and was hoping for some real screen magic.I always try to learn something from every film I watch, this time I think I learnt that maybe sometimes the memory of a film is more vital, interesting and real than the film itself. I very much doubt if this is a new idea but I'm not going to put it to the test. I haven't seen La planète sauvage for many many years and having seen this I doubt if I ever will again, just in case I destroy the fond memories I have of it.I also learnt that if you read really really fast you can watch subtitled films on fast forward and not miss a sodding thing.
Logan San
It's not as bad as some people want to make you think. "Time Masters" is much better, but if you like "Time Masters" (and like it much more than "The Fantastic Planet") then you'll probably like "Gandahar" (aka "Light Years") too. It's true, it has a lot of talk, but that's because it HAS a real story instead of other so called adult animation movies. The music wasn't bad (I even find it good), but especially one music was getting on my nerves at the end of the film. The animation isn't a breakthrough either, but with it's light effects and the fantastic backgrounds it was 100 times better than the animation in Fantastic Planet. On the other hand it's falling to dust if compared to the best Japanese animation films at that time like "Akira" for example.Go and decide for yourself!
AD
