Review: Time-twisting Gandahar returns to the big screen in new restoration

This has been a particularly great year for animated movies of years gone by returning to the big screen. Alongside the expectedly excellent Ghibli Fest programming which brings lots of that legendary studio's catalogue to theaters every year, we've gotten extra chances to watch the likes of Shrek, Tekkonkinkreet, Your Name, and Adolescence of Utena with a crowd, in addition to others. Now, Janus Films is stepping up to the plate with a new 4K restoration of the uncut version of René Laloux's final film, Gandahar.

Laloux is best known for his seminal animated classic The Fantastic Planet, which is one of the few animated movies that has elbowed its way into the Criterion Collection. That was the only movie of his I had previously seen, and I knew Gandahar only by name. Ends up, it is just as trippy and strange as you might imagine if you've seen other works by Laloux. That aspect of the film hit just as I imagined it would. What I didn't expect is how timely a tale Gandahar is -- watching it in 2026, it feels like maybe Laloux used the film's Door of Time to craft a film that speaks almost scarily specifically to the moment we live in.

The people of Gandahar, most of them blue-skinned and nearly naked, live an idyllic life in their city/mountain/statue of Jasper. They spend their days gathering fruit alongside their animal companions, laying in the fields, tending their crops. Some of them also spend days doing scientific experiments with sometimes shocking and disturbing outcomes, but from what we see, it seems like those days are largely behind this society. They at least have the appearance of civility and peace. 

So when a new threat emerges, the Gandaharians are ill-equipped to rise to the challenge. They have lived in peace so long that they no longer know the ways of war. Their Mirror Birds, cyclopic avians that serve as flying security cameras, are being shot out of the sky. Gandahar is literally flying blind, unable to assess the situation and thus, unable to figure out a defensive strategy. So they elect Sylvain, a fair-skinned servant (I think he's the only person in Gandahar who isn't blue), to venture out and figure out what the hell is going on. Thus, an adventure begins.

And what a weird adventure it is. This world is richly imagined and often beautifully rendered, even if some of the animation proves a bit clunky and strange at times. I would say this isn't quite on par with The Fantastic Planet on the aesthetic front, but there's still plenty of stunning vistas and compositions to behold. A half-full eye candy dish, if you will.

Sylvain meets a race of malformed people called the Transformed, who are the result of various Gandaharian experiments. Some of them have multiple heads, bodies full of limbs, or no faces to speak of. They become allies to Sylvain, and their strange way of speaking hints at the larger structure of the story. They use a kind of timeless, or rather time-crunching, tense when they speak: "you were-are," "we had-will have." Their sentences exist in the past and present (or future) simultaneously, their understanding of time as non-linear. 

Yes, this is one of those timey-wimey sci-fi stories. The afore-mentioned Door of Time allows people to travel through time. Some characters live for a thousand years or more. The fall of Gandahar exists in the future, its salvation, in the past. For as weird as it is, the film isn't terribly hard to follow if you just go with it and accept that time-travel logic is always going to get a little loopy. It's one of those things where you have to give the film a little grace, and meet it on its terms. Which I found easy enough to do, in this case.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Gandahar (and this is a movie full of weird things) is how somewhat uneventful Sylvain's adventure is. He comes up against various foes and obstacles, including the Transformed, a giant kaiju-type dinosaur monster, an army of metal men, and a giant brain, but it rarely feels like he's really in danger. Time and time again, he's able to get where he's going and accomplish his goals without much friction. It's so easy to sneak onto an enemy ship, out of an egg-shaped prison, to return home, to get back to a remote platform in the middle of the sea. It's relatively smooth-going for Sylvain, which isn't necessarily a knock against the movie, but it certainly struck me as strange.

The giant brain, a being called The Metamorph, is where the film feels like it's speaking directly to our moment. A sort of god-like being, it is also a former Gandaharian experiment, one that ended up killing its creators. Since then, it's been forgotten, allowed to grow exponentially out in the middle of the sea, where it's gained greater sentience, power, and influence. Now, it's an existential threat to all life. It plays much like an AI-gone-haywire narrative, a human creation that is gobbling up more and more resources, and becoming an antagonist of all that is natural and organic. Chilling stuff, to be sure.

From what I gather, Gandahar doesn't occupy a place in the animation canon (whatever that means), and it certainly is a strange, and slightly threadbare, watch. But this new restoration is a great way to give it another shot -- or, if you're like me, to finally discover it.