Les Maîtres du temps
| Les Maîtres du temps | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | René Laloux Tibor Hernádi (technical director) |
| Written by | Moebius René Laloux Jean-Patrick Manchette Stefan Wul |
| Starring | Jean Valmont Michel Elias Frédéric Legros Yves-Marie Maurin Monique Thierry Sady Rebbot |
| Cinematography | Zoltán Bacsó András Klausz Mihály Kovács Árpád Lossonczy |
| Edited by | Dominique Boischot |
| Music by | Jean-Pierre Bourtayre Pierre Tardy Christian Zanesi |
| Distributed by | Image Entertainment |
Release dates |  March 24, 1982 |
Running time | 79 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Les Maîtres du temps (lit. The Masters of Time, a.k.a. Time Masters, Az idő urai in Hungarian) is an animated French/Hungarian science fiction film (79 minutes) from 1982. The film centers around a boy, Piel, who is stranded on Perdide, a desert planet where giant killer hornets lives, waiting to be rescued, and the space pilot Jaffar, the exiled prince Matton, his sister Belle and Jaffar's old friend Silbad who are trying to reach Perdide and save Piel before it is too late.
Plot
The story begins with a man named Claude driving a six-wheeled, insect-like vehicle over the desert surface of Perdide very fast. He attempts to communicate with Jaffar, saying that "they attacked". After a crash that wrecks his vehicle, he lets his son Piel down from the wreckage; he cannot extricate himself. Piel is too young to comprehend the interstellar transceiver that Claude hands him. It's red and white and egg-shaped. So Claude tells him that it's a creature named "Mike" that will talk to him, and to do whatever Mike tells him to do, but first to run to a sort of forest.
Jaffar is piloting a spacecraft, the 22 Double Diamond. He plans to reach Perdide by being pulled along by the gravitational field of the Blue Comet. But he's several planetary systems away, and does not go directly to Perdide or the Blue Comet. His passengers are a blond Prince and Princess who have been deposed from their planet; they bring with them a treasure the Prince took along to fund a restoration. Each contacts Piel with the transceiver; when they meet Silbad, he sings Piel a song as well, as does the Princess.
The most important event on the way to Perdide is that the Prince escapes in a shuttlecraft to a world which is inhabited by faceless, identical white male angels. They capture both the Prince and Jaffar, who followed in a space lifeboat. The men will be thrown into the living, thinking amorphous being who controls this planet. One of two telepaths who have followed Silbad onto Jaffar's ship tells Jaffar to resist being assimilated with all the hate and contempt he can muster. When Jaffar tells the Prince to do so as well, the Prince leaps into the being and does so, not only destroying it and the building but causing the skin and wings of all the angels to peel away to reveal that they were originally scruffy spacemen reminiscent of pirates.
Thereby Jaffar acquires a crew of misfits who find themselves at Perdide, but at the point at which the planet is being transported through time by a bizarre race of aliens known only as the Masters of Time. Perdide and everything on it, including Piel, is sent back 60 years through time. This creates a paradox in which the boy Piel becomes linked with the aged space-farer Silbad - essentially becoming him. Silbad was rescued from Perdide 60 years previously by a lone space-traveller who mysteriously found himself at the planet: an event his ship's computer (named Lowry in the English-dubbed version) describes as "the planet's fault."
Claude's vehicle blew up when his son reached the forest. No contact is made with the aliens; only one is seen for a moment, a tall biped with a drooping, beak-like snout.
Information
The BBC aired an English-language dubbed version in 1987 and 1991 called Time Masters, featuring, amongst others, the voice of Ray Brooks, famous for being the narrator of Mr. Benn.
Several versions has been released on DVD:
- A French edition (ASIN: B00017O6KM, 2 disc collectors edition) which was released in 2004 and has no English subtitles.
- The out of print single disc edition released in the USA in 2000 (ASIN: B00004S8A2) is in French with English subtitles.
- UK distributor Eureka! released a restored, wide-screen and English-subtitled version of the film as part of its Masters of Cinema collection on October 22, 2007.
Directed by René Laloux, the film was produced largely at the PannóniaFilm studios in Hungary. The visual design was based on the art of Moebius, otherwise known as Jean Giraud.
The motion picture story is based on the novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (1958) by the French writer Stefan Wul.