Escargots, Les
Entry updated 6 March 2024. Tagged: Film.
["The Snails"] French animated film (1966). Société des Film d'Art et de Culture. Directed by René Laloux. Written by Roland Topor and René Laloux. Colour. 11 mins.
This excellent, wordless short is in a very different style to Laloux and Topor's feature-length collaboration, La Planète Sauvage (1973). A farmer is unable to make his crops grow until he discovers he can water them with tears. The huge plants that result attract snails which overnight grow to giant-size Monsters (see Great and Small). After eating all the crops, they move towards a City, crushing people and cars en route. In the city, they eat all the population that has not fled, luring children with projections of cats. Having destroyed the city, the snails move away and starve to death, leaving a new city to grow up. The farmer then begins watering carrots with his tears, which at the end of the film are attracting giant rabbits.
Snails are not the obvious choice for a Monster Movie, even an unconventional one, but here Laloux manages to make them both funny and menacing. Where Laloux's later films have physically featureless characters, here the farmer is drawn in an expressionistic style with real attempts at emotion. Conversely, the imaginative background designs of La Planète Sauvage are absent. Some have read into it a political parable about voracious government and tax officials. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry