La Planète Sauvage
Illustration, Typography
overview
Animated sci-fi masterpiece La Planète Sauvage (a.k.a. Fantastic Planet), winner at Cannes Film Festival in 1973, is a bizarre and beautiful film. Towering blue-skinned figures, tiny humanoids in the midst of revolt, and drug-induced Tantric sex transport viewers to a truly magical setting.
Composer Alain Goraguer creates an equally hypnotic score from a palette of effects-laden guitars, flutes, Fender Rhodes, and strings. While the lush arrangements are reminiscent of Goraguer's collaborations with Serge Gainsbourg in the 1960s, space-age synth flourishes suggest a more psychedelic era. Moody vignettes flow together in tense, slow-paced funk rhythms and Baroque textures.
It comes as no surprise that La Planète Sauvage has been cited as an influence on contemporary artists such as French duo Air and American hip-hop producers J Dilla and Madlib. Gorgeous, interplanetary soundscapes resemble the surreal meeting point between Pink Floyd's Obscured by Clouds and Broadcast's Future Crayon.
project specs
Timeframe: 4 weeks
Personnel: Solo
Roles / Skills: Layout, Typography, Digital Illustration
Tools: Illustrator
challenge
This incredible score has become a cult classic, directly influenced modern music, and still sounds contemporary, if not ahead of this time. It has been released and reissued several times but has never been given the proper visual design treatment it deserves.
The artwork for the album reissues usually consist of stills from the movie and gives the feeling that designing this was an afterthought and not worthy of a fully realized visual identity to celebrate this wonderful piece of music that can stand alone from the equally great film.
solution
Of course, as designers of this album before me did, I used the film as my main inspiration. The film was produced in the ’70s and has a classic hand-drawn animation look. I wanted to bring that style into the 21st century by creating crisp vector versions of the characters for the album artwork.
Inspiration
As you can see from these film stills, the intense red eyes of the native Traags is an omnipresent feature of the film. They take center stage in my execution of the cover. By cutting off the bottom half of the figure’s face, the focus on the eyes becomes even stronger.
I used the color coded chest markings of the Traag elders for the sleeves of each of the four album sections. The glowing red eyes come in to play again as the decal on the disc representing side A, B, etc.
Front
Back
