“Planètes” or “Dandelion’s Odyssey,’ a delightful dialogue-free animated tale of a group of adorable dandelion seeds, adrift in space and seeking a new home after Earth is obliterated by nuclear war, doesn’t initially sound like the most hopeful of stories.
But at a Cannes Film Festival that has been defined by the sense that the world is going to hell with haunting films that take on everything from the reverberations of abuse to the perils of postpartum depression and the devastation of losing those you love, Momoko Seto’s small, often silly, little gem of a film still stands apart. It’s more than a bit scrappy — the animation can be somewhat crude at times — but it wins you over with just enough earned charm as it sets forth on a small-scale, interplanetary adventure.
In “Planètes,” a nuclear bombardment swallows the world in fire and sends the humble dandelion seeds floating through space. This instills the film with a less grounded and more expansive sci-fi element, though it also relies on you again going with a group of non-human characters that utter not a word. It doesn’t have quite the same cute factor as, say, the cat from the Oscar-winning “Flow” — due to the whole them not having faces thing — but damn it if you don’t come to care for these little dandelion seeds all the same.
Premiering Wednesday in the Critics Week sidebar at the festival, this begins with a glimpse of the entire universe that fades into the vast stars becoming the parts of the dandelion. Living peacefully by the water in a beautiful valley, this is not to last as nuclear projectiles almost immediately begin falling in the distance. As the explosions rock their world and fire begins to burn through everything, a group of seeds launch themselves off from their stem to begin floating away… And floating… And floating until they leave behind the now desolate carcass of a planet, go past the moon, on through a black hole, and arrive at a new potential home.
It’s there that we get to meet the seeds Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa (at least that’s what the festival description says which we’ll just have to take the word of). They don’t speak, instead making little almost chirping sounds to each other, and are distinguished primarily by their size difference. As they encounter one challenge after another on this strange yet familiar new planet, from hazardous elements to other creatures, they’ll repeatedly be put at risk of being destroyed before they can arrive at a safe place.
The result is a film that isn’t particularly groundbreaking in terms of its narrative, which is a simple and straightforward survival story, though it still thrives in the textures of the animation. The landscapes that the seed squad skates, bounces, or flies through are all varied, with slippery ice dominating one part of the planet while a vast ocean dominates another. As we get further and further along on the journey, each stage inflicting more harm on the seeds until there may be none left, the more there is usage of striking stop-motion techniques for some of the natural world that it brings to life beautifully.
It’s almost like watching a nature documentary, but if the camera were launched to another planet that we may not have fully learned about yet. There are still some familiar life forms, like a group of slugs that the seeds hitch a ride on, but this also precedes a sequence that feels ripped right out of Dune with enormous sand creatures bursting up from the ground and threatening to take them under. Frequently, these creatures will prove successful and the dandelion seed family will start to grow rather small.
All of this is mostly silly and sweet with growing notes of a slight somberness that benefits from the loving attention given to every well-crafted detail. Even when the moves of the seeds can look a little stiff and awkward, it’s the meticulously well-crafted environment around them that ensures everything takes flight when it needs to. Though still more than a little slight, only running 77 minutes despite feeling like it had more gas in the tank and playing out pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to, that suits the film just fine.
It’s also a film that lives in the shadow of “Flow.” Not just because both premiered at the festival, part of only a handful of animated films to do so. They also share a lack of dialogue and people as their nonhuman protagonists confront the end of the world — in the case of “Flow,” a steadily rising flood threatening to consume everything.
“Planètes” may not resonate as much as “Flow,” as it’s a great deal weirder. But it still finds moments of the sublime, of hope and sweetness that make you more than willing to go along with it.
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