I just watched Light Years for the first time

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MIND. BLOWN.

French animation
1980's music
Christohpher Plummer as a giant brain

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Hehe, I remember watching this alot along with Fantastic Planet when I was young. I've seen FP recently but had forgotten about this one. Haven't seen it since I was a kid. I should hunt this down and give it a watch if it's on DVD.

Has anyone else besides me ever watched an old animation called Winds of Change? It's was a collection of short stories based around Greek Mythology. Each one ending a tragic downbeat note. It also had a hip disco music score too.

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Found that they have the whole movie up on YouTube. I'm currently watching it right now. The animation holds up alot better than I imagined. Very surreal, and has an old Heavy Metal feel to it.

Here's the first video:

[youtube=560,345]J3FsASNavdU&hl=en&fs=1[/youtube]


Also here's a French clip for another film René Laloux did called Time Masters. The english version is pretty rare to come by but as you can see from the clip it has that same surrealness that Light Years and Fantastic Planet had:

[youtube=560,345]ImYdkoZXOsU&hl=en&fs=1[/youtube]

And in case someone hasn't seen it, here's the trailer for Laloux's Fantastic Planet:

[youtube=560,345]SgCxCZNkQ9E&hl=en&fs=1[/youtube]

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Rene Laloux made some really trippy cartoons, no doubt about that.

And I agree that they all have a Heavy Metal feel to them. Plus, you gotta like that music.

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While looking for a DVD copy of Light Years (the US version apparently only exists as a  VHS rip and the original version, Gandahar, on a Region 2 dvd), I came across this bit of info from Twitch Films which explains why it has such a Heavy Metal feel to it and the changes Harvey Weinstein made in the localization:

The idea for creating “Gandahar” came immediately after the huge success of “La Planète Sauvage”. René Laloux got into contact with several artists from “Heavy Metal” magazine like Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Philippe Caza, and discussed many possible projects with them, most of which unfortunately never became reality. One of the ideas Laloux discussed with Caza was a feature film based on Jean-Pierre Andravon’s novel “Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar” (which translates as “The Machine-men vs. Gandahar”). Caza agreed, designs were created but the project got abandoned because Laloux’ resources were needed elsewhere.

It never completely died though: all the way through the production of “Les Maîtres du Temps” Caza and Laloux were trying to get “Gandahar” off the ground. For years these efforts were fruitless, but suddenly there was a breakthrough when they got a lucrative offer from a most unexpected direction: an animation studio in North Korea was willing and able to put 150 people to work on a Laloux film, for basically peanuts. René Laloux accepted and the production moved to Pyongyang, making Laloux possibly the only Western director to have each of his features shot in a different communist country!

As always this new team proved a blessing and a curse: Philippe Caza had some revolutionary techniques in mind for visualizing the world of Gandahar, but most had to be dropped in favor of more conventional methods. The North Koreans turned out to be very talented but completely unaware of different art-styles. If Caza wanted something to look “Chinese” for example, the French team members had to bring Chinese art with them to show the Koreans what they meant, as the Pyongyang team had never even seen such pictures.
The North Koreans were also rather prudish and many had never seen non-Asian women naked before, which made it difficult for them to relate to the many cannonball-breasted nude amazons Caza had peppered throughout his production designs. Funnily enough this became such a problem that the French needed to bring erotic magazines with them to show the shocked animators that such women actually exist!
Despite these difficulties the movie got finished, on time, reasonably within budget and with a consistent new style, a major victory for the French-Korean team.
Gandahar got released in France in 1988 and became a big local success. Unfortunately this was the start of a very troubled international release which nearly doomed the movie to oblivion.

First the international release got fumbled by the French distributor and Harvey Weinstein caught it on the rebound. Yes, THAT Harvey Weinstein.

Harvey decided that, while he liked what he saw, American audiences certainly wouldn’t. He cut some of the nudity, re-edited parts, replaced the entire score and changed some of the names. Isaac Asimov (yes, THAT Isaac Asimov) agreed to do some of the translations for the English dub and of course “Gandahar” also got the new title “Light Years”, sometimes even “Isaac Asimov’s Light Years”. Having done all this hard work Harvey saw fit to give himself a directing credit, billing himself next to René Laloux.
For honesty’s sake I’ll mention that René Laloux has always said he had no objection to these alterations. The new version didn’t exactly turn into a marketing success though: it’s very strange that I, as an avid science fiction fan in the Eighties, never even knew this movie existed in either its “Gandahar” or “Light Years” shape.

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Harvey Weinstein is such a tool. You'd think from the cover that he directed the whole thing, when all he did was translate it and cut some stuff out.

And thinking that even with cuts it would be palatable to American audiences is laughable.