Fiul Stelelor / The Son of the Stars (Calin Cazan, Dan Chisovski & Mircea Toia, 1985)

Being a child of the 80’s and a total sucker for rotoscoped films (vintage ones, not the Linklater kind), I was completely enchanted by ‘The Son of the Stars’ recently restored by Deaf Crocodile and released on Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome, as a follow-up to Cazan and Toia’s first collaboration ‘Delta Space Mission’ (1984) (written about in THIS ARTICLE). A wildly weird mix of science-fiction and fantasy found in plenty of Saturday morning cartoons of the time, particularly from Filmation workshop (Flash Gordon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Bravestarr), the film opens like ‘Tarzan’ of the very distant future (in the year of 6470!), only to turn into an existential space opera that involves everything but the kitchen sink from learning telepathic communication to facing a mysterious entity that controls time, and evokes Lovecraftian lore in one of its manifestations. 

I can’t tell which Western films were available in Romania behind the Iron Curtain, but I can’t shake off the feeling that the creative team of this low-budget gem did come across René Laloux’s ‘The Masters of Time’ (1982), as well as with some of Ralph Bakshi’s features. They could’ve also been influenced by Vladimir Tarasov’s shorts of the late 70’s, considering that both visuals – quite charming in their ‘wobbliness’ – and synth-and-bleep-heavy soundscapes can often be labeled as psychedelic, despite the gloomy color palette of murky greens, grayish blues, and muddy oranges. The bizarre universe that the viewer is taken to reveals the exotic jungles of Doreea where a young hero, Dan, is raised by pear-shaped critters, an industrial wasteland guarded by a knight who wouldn’t be out of place in ‘Star Wars’, and a rocky planet whose caves serve as communication channels to different worlds, and where ‘matter is in constant transformation’. Speaking of which, Dan’s coming-of-age-and-savior that parallels his intergalactic adventure assumes the shape-shifting traits of imaginative designs, with spatio-temporal distortions and vacuum-defying conflicts posing as signs of the story’s unexpected turns.