ANI-MOVIES, *Time Masters

Rene Laloux broke some sci-fi movie standards with his animated feature of Fantastic Planet, but nearly a decade later his next full-length production of Time Masters completely fell flat on its face. Based on the Stefan Wul(who also wrote Fantastic Planet)novel from the 50s, The Orphan Of Perdide, Laloux teamed up with infamous illustrator Moebius to create this drawn-out nap of a space story titled Time Masters. This was an indie animated film with some interesting character, ship, and creature designs, but the movie plays out like a prolonged episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series by Filmation. In fact, the story goes on like Star Trek: The Motion Picture with huge gaps spent just looking at the backgrounds and surrounding areas. The story is profoundly thin on plot and doesn't really even become a time travel story until the final act. Whereas Fantastic Planet had some amazing visuals and a good premise behind it, Time Masters is more like a rejected script for Will Smith's vanity project for his son, After Earth.

A young boy named Piel gets marooned on a planet where space wanderer Jaffar picks up the signal from and plans to rescue Piel since he's the son of a friend of his. Jaffar happens to be transporting a pair of exiled royal siblings along with their collected loot to a hidden part of the galaxy but stops on another world to see his old friend Silbad who has knowledge of the planet Perdide that Piel is trapped on. Silbad communicates with Piel via a radio and helps him to find the right things to live on until they can reach Perdide which should take over a month by their own time. A pair of little annoying telepaths stow away on the rescue mission with the others, and they run across a species of faceless winged humanoids under the control of living liquid which Jaffar and his crew manage to stop. Piel meanwhile makes contact with a bizarre centaur-like creature who gives him a ride, even though he loses the communicator. When Jaffar's crew finally reach Perdide, they learn that the entire world was sent back in time by a race called the Masters of Time for a colonization experiment. Silbad grows sick and dies, even though it's revealed that he was actually the older version of Piel from 60 years in the future.

Time Masters has a terrible dub to it, making it incredibly hard to follow the narrative, so you might be better off watching a subtitled French version of it instead. There are seriously low stakes involved and the movie trots uphill trying to get to its revelation. This was intended to be a full TV series, even though it's impossible to see how the plot could be stretched out that long. Moebius' artwork is the main plus to the film, but unless you're wanting to witness a causality loop at a mind-numbing pace, the only thing this animated space tale might be worth a look for is if you're into getting hopped-up on goofballs.