‘Dandelion’s Odyssey’ review: Artistic animation takes a plant’s eye-view of the apocalypse

Dir: Momoko Seto. France/Belgium. 2025. 76 minutes

4 dandelion seeds – or ‘achenes’ to provide them their scientific title – embark on a outstanding journey when a nuclear apocalypse destroys their house on Earth in Momoko Seto’s creative, dialogue-free characteristic debut. Propelled into the stratosphere, the buddies are sucked via a black gap and finally discover themselves on a brand new planet. That’s only the start of the voyage as they have to dodge voracious floating tadpoles, hitch rides on slugs and work collectively to hunt out fertile floor through which to plant their roots.

An immersive and infrequently beguiling visible expertise

This isn’t the primary animation to take an environmental disaster as its jumping-off level. However with its inventive mix of 3D pc animation and time lapse nature pictures, it is likely one of the extra strikingly authentic footage to think about life after the tip of the world. Whereas it’s admittedly not probably the most gripping piece of storytelling, the movie is an immersive and infrequently beguiling visible expertise. 

Dandelion’s Odyssey screens in Annecy’s essential competitors having premiered because the closing movie of Cannes’ Critics’ Week, the place it gained the Fipresci Prize. The movie builds on methods that Seto developed in a number of of her quick movies – together with Planet Z (2011) and Planet Sigma (2015), each of which launched in Berlin – and likewise blended macro pictures and time lapse footage of crops, bugs and animals to create sci-fi fantasy worlds. This characteristic, which might be launched by Gébéka Movies in France with the title Planètes, is an enchanting curio which may join with an analogous viewers to that of Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s research of insect life in miniature, Microcosmos. 

It’s one thing of an ask to require an viewers to empathise with dandelion seeds and, for a part of the movie at the least, a pair of glutinous brown slugs – not least as a result of anybody with a backyard will regard each as mortal enemies. However via good use of sound and music, plus deft character design, Seto manages to imbue every of the achenes with a definite persona. (Within the supporting literature, the seeds are given names that are by no means used within the movie.)

Sturdy Dendelion is the chief, the boldest and most adventurous; Baraban has a bigger seed, which makes it cumbersome and sluggish; Léonto has simply 4 pappi (the tiny hairs that assist the seeds to fly) and loses them one after the other in moments of stress and Taraxa’s stalk is curved, giving it a diffident, unsure high quality. Though the seeds don’t converse they’re given voices; fluting, ethereal and melodic, they sound somewhat just like the pink knitted aliens in Oliver Postgate’s animated TV sequence, The Clangers.

The rating, by Quentin Sirjacq and Nicolas Becker, and Becker’s sound design are essential components within the storytelling, with the various approaches and devices capturing the tone of every chapter of the journey. Some sections use the wistfully percussive qualities of the gamelan, others are digital and a full orchestra is pressed into service for sure scenes, together with an exultant waltz that closes the movie. 

Probably the most distinctive aspect, nevertheless, is the pictures. Cease movement footage of lichen, moss, fungi and crops, shot over weeks and months, is used to create an oddly persuasive alien world. The dandelion seeds hitch a carry on the again of a few slugs, escaping a fast-spreading fungal community; toadstools, shot from beneath, sprout into city-sized edifices. It’s oddly lovely and barely sinister. There’s a lightness to the movie, which performs quick and unfastened with the legal guidelines of physics, with large cuttlefish swimming in outer area and large, voracious tadpoles that may float above the water.