LA REVANCHE DES HUMANOIDES (1983)
aka Revenge of the Humanoids
Article 4743 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-27-2015
Directed by Albert Barille
Featuring the voices of Annie Balestra, Roger Carel, Claude Chantal
Country: France
What it is: Animated space opera

Space travelers have adventures and battle evil.

Yes, the plot description is extremely vague, but that’s because the only copy I could find of this one was in French. Usually, when the plot is a simple good-vs-evil story, that’s not a big problem; however, I’m not sure that summary is quite accurate for this one, though it seems so at first. I had quite a few impediments in trying to follow the story visually. The first problem is simply that the movie is several episodes of an animated series edited together; the series was a French animated series called IL ETAIT UNE FOIS…L’ESPACE, and any time you edit a series like this into a movie, it’s usually hard to follow even if you understand the language. Furthermore, because much of the animation is of the limited variety, you can’t read character expressions very well to tap into the emotional sense of the dialogue. Combine that with a bewildering array of characters, and the movie becomes rather impenetrable, and the fact that several sequences seem to be flashbacks certainly doesn’t help. So I’m mostly at a loss with this one; all I can say is it starts out feeling like an animated STAR WARS imitation but seems to end on cosmic/mystical note. Well, at least I can mark this one as “seen” on my list.