Linbeymusol
Wonderful character development!
CheerupSilver
Very Cool!!!
Unlimitedia
Sick Product of a Sick System
SunnyHello
Nice effects though.
rodrig58
René Laloux was a very talented French film director of animation films. His most successful film is Fantastic Planet (1973) La planète sauvage (original title). This Gandahar, made 15 years later in 1988, is a success too, not at the same high level as the Fantastic Planet, but still successful. The film is enormously beneficial to the famous voices of Christopher Plummer, Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Anny Duperey, Georges Wilson and John Shea. Very beautiful drawings, unlimited imagination, special music signed by Gabriel Yared.
Charles Herold (cherold)
While Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet is his most famous film, I consider Light Years his best. Like Fantastic Planet, it is extraordinarily imaginative and visually striking. There are all sorts of odd moments; swirling brain cells forming shapes, a woman suckling a strange creature, a tribe of misshapen people, each one different in equally twisted and disturbed ways.However, this movie has a much more engrossing story than Fantastic Planet. It is a weird tale of time travel and bizarre experimentation, with a hero who often seems more flukishly lucky than skilled.I saw the English-dub version, as opposed to the original French version called Gandahar. The voice acting is good, particularly Christopher Plummer. For some reason the American producers threw out the original score for a synth-heavy new score. I found the original on youtube and watched a little, and I would say the original score was better, but not by so much that it really effects the movie. Since the youtube video was in French, I can't tell if the story or dialogue are especially different.For me, this is easily the best of Laloux's three features (followed by Fantastic Planet).
jamesdelf
Some interesting ideas but best left in a book or at least a better adaptation, please. This is the sort of thing that gives non-children's animation a bad name, and SCI-FI for that matter. A meandering plot, no engaging characters to care about, no emotional engagement what so ever. It feels like the whole thing has been turned to stone. Oh and the animation is terrible. US and Japanese techniques at this time were years ahead. It is so crude and dull it makes mid-80's Scooby Doo look like Toy Story! But more important and unforgivable is the story and characters. And it takes itself so seriously. Interestingly it shows a race that creates without any regard for what will happen in the future and those things come back to destroy them. e.g. Osama, Saddam... But there was no punishment for those who created the monsters, just a nasty demise for the monsters for being evil. What is this trying to teach?
George Haley
This appears to be an animated version of some semi-erotic European SF comic. While arguably some of the animation is undetailed and stingy with motion, creative art direction offsets this to a large degree. In fact, a good deal of this movie is jaw dropping, sweeping vistas of Flash-Gordon-meets-Hieronymous-Bosch. If only it was as well animated as, say, He-man, well, then you'd really have something. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it's something at once simplistic about killer robots at the beck and call of this giant glans-brain-anus beaked floating squid thing, and something overly convoluted about potato faced mutants and time travel. The later have a speaking device which will not add to your comprehension of the ending of the movie about talking in then-now-later, "I will did are going gone went over under behind then now later." May well be as enjoyable with your favorite psychedelic music as soundtrack instead of that business, fun to watch high. If you like Barbarella or Heavy Metal, you'll dig this.
