A novel by Stefan Wul, drawings by Moebius, dialogues by Jean-Patrick Manchette,  directed  by  René  Laloux; there is no better line-up for an animated French science-fiction film. When literature, crime stories and science fiction, comics and cartoons themselves appoint one of their best representatives, the conditions are reunited for a sumptuous story in images, a glorious cartoon opera… Science fiction is a genre – yes, some still exist – where the masters know better than anyone what they owe to the very laws that constitute a genre… There are thus no major surprises in the scenario itself. You expected fabulous planets and hellacious ones: you’ve got them. You perhaps expected a ship wandering through the stars, under the leadership of a daring navigator, and then a ramshackle raft, and probably a mighty battlecruiser of a galactic empire. Well, you win. You would have lamented not finding the demonic trap set by an incomprehensible entity on some planet. It’s in there. If you are a true aficionado, you’d still need an athletic hero, a fallen prince, a repentant princess, and a crusty old man burned by a hundred suns who had survived a thousand planets. You have all that, and as a bonus, an insufferable kid, plus space fascists just like those you find lurking everywhere on earth. Perhaps you didn’t dare to dream of telepaths, flying men, gurgling aliens. You were wrong. Of course, thanks to the title, you were expecting some kind of perilous leap in time that allows a man to rediscover himself as  a child, sometimes leading him to kill his great-grandfather. In short, that famous time paradox that always creates a charming dizziness, probably because you don’t understand anything about it (especially when Einstein is called in to explain it all; everything becomes marvellously obscure and evil). You will get your time paradox, and if your Cartesian mind stumbles over this perfectly simple thing, take along your youngest who has read it a hundred times, who will explain it all to you.

Guy Gauthier