The reviews for this animation were, as is so often the case on IMDB, wildly misleading for the most part. Which isn't usually a problem, unless it causes me and my wife to lose over an hour of our lives on what essentially looks like a film school project.Animation: Call it ground breaking as much as you like, "not very jerky for its time" is the best one can objectively say about it. This title seems to suffer from the bigotry of low expectations, as people possibly only compare this to He-Man or other such animated children's shows of the period. However, we have to acknowledge that this same year Akira came out. Gentlemen, we had the technology. That the creators did not have the money or inclination to use that technology is on them.Art: It's creative in some places, which is why I am generously giving it 3 stars instead of just 1. The initial scenes seem to have inspired the recent Valerian movie. The Deformed are interesting to see, and the sole redeeming aspect of the entire movie. The evil penis was just not scary nor intimidating.Music: Monotonous, misplaced and combined horribly with the visuals. Where some animations use dramatic changes in music to compensate for lack of action, this movie inexplicably does the reverse: It manages to reduce any action to a sullen, unpunctuated plodding of the storyline. It would have been advisable for the soundtrack people to have actually watched the movie.Story: An utterly flat sketch of a story, with horrid conversations that fail even in their attempt at being pretentious. Protagonist is told to go and investigate, uneventfully travels through time, laughably easily kills the evil penis. Character development? There was absolutely nothing there to develop. I relate more to Papa Smurf than this protagonist.Conclusion: After no more than 10 minutes I wanted my suffering to end, but my wife (a pox upon her!) kept hoping it would somehow pick up. It didn't. No claims against Weinstein have yet been proven in a court of law, but I insist that just for his part in releasing this movie he deserves many years behind bars.

It feels too easy to call Rene Laloux's animated movies "trippy", as if one can only appreciate them while on drugs. But there's a kind of weird dream logic mixed with hallucinogenic science fiction that Laloux, along with his collaborator Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seems to have mastered. Unfortunately, Gandahar was his last feature film, and not his best. But for animation buffs or fans of weird sci-fi, it's well worth a look.Gandahar uses a fairly straightforward, action-driven space opera plot line. It dramatizes the clash between nature and technology, perhaps in an over-literal way. Most of the above-mentioned weirdness comes from a race of misshapen seers that speak in impossible tenses, and a plot that requires time travel to a point which is simultaneously past and future. It's not convoluted, but it's impossible to understand just as actual time travel would be to our chronologically-limited minds. Oh, and there are lots of breasts, most of them belonging to blue people. Between that and the violence, Gandahar is certainly much less child-friendly than Laloux's other films.Gandahar isn't really original as a whole, although there's a lot of fun absurdities like giant crabs throwing rocks at armies of metal men. But it's a fun watch, with just enough weirdness to put it above the familiar repertoire of 1980s science fiction. If you're a fan of any of the artists mentioned above, this is a must-see. If you're not, maybe give Gandahar a chance anyway. Who knows, you might like it.

It is a very good anticipation movie. the part describing the lovely and environmental gandahar is wonderful. While renewing a 70's vision of sex, nature and happiness, the colors, sounds and pictures (a young girl offering her breast to a new born invented animal who looks like a tapir, born out of a grown plant). the story: mixing future and past, threatening the present by having itself created in the past, the elements that will be dangerous in the future. It is also a huge criticism of the liability of the human being regarding its evil habit to master the nature, th human body and science. In the end, scientific rubbish save the human beings from a great scientific discovery they made years ago. Happiness is conditioned by assuming one's mistakes. A great philosophical tale. The blue skinned woman with head-wings is very impressive, as well as the very beautiful nude females.

I haven't seen this film since I was about 11 years old (no rental store has it), however this is an excellent movie, filled with prophecies, rebellion, and good morals.Gandahar is set during a time when an empire rules the world with a steady fist, and a person is sent to the future to fulfill a prophecy created by the ruler 1000 years before. "Gandahr was will be saved." Gandahar details how a person from the past tries to save the future.Gandahar reminds me of Frank Herbert's Dune series. If you like Dune, Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix, or any George Lucas film, then this movie is definitely worth a watch.