The Son of the Stars

Womb-like, a silvery ship plummets through the heavens, a young boy aboard losing his parents when they answer to an outer space distress signal. He becomes orphaned, growing up amidst artificial and puzzling lifeforms on an alien world, amid a landscape of strange vegetation and uncanny encounters. His mind becomes telepathic as he exhibits strange powers, but always, his mind returns to the one image that, like a ghost, haunts him: that of the lost pilot, Andra O'Neill.

The Son of the Stars was a surprising find on YouTube, an obscure Romanian animated sci-fi epic of a young boy, Dan (voiced by Mihai Cafrița), born to parents in space, whose parents depart in a craft to respond to a curious distress signal. Orphaned, he quickly crashes his ship, The Argos, on an alien world ruled by big-eyed, cartoon-like, floating balloon creatures shaped like oversized teardrops.

He grows to manhood developing psychic abilities, guided in part by his onboard AI "Bob" (voiced by Marcel Iureș). He discovers that he is under the attendance of the Kama, an alien race captured in anabiosis (frozen as stone, literally) somewhere in the Van Kleef Belt: a place that is the tentacled outer-space arms of a vast, puzzling, arcane entity. This entity is grabbing the space explorers on various worlds into a sort of "Super-Sargasso Sea" (as Charles Fort might have termed it) and imprisoning them there. Following his own personal Journey Myth, Dan meets his supernatural heroes and helpers in the form of a weird alien knight, as well as Node, a very cute little alien vaguely reminiscent of Marvin the Martian.

But is this all just another mental projection? Will Dan be able to time travel, via the device given to him by the strange knight, to free the captives and reset the balance of things? The film is often tangled and obscure in its plotting. However, it is always compelling viewing and never dull.

The visuals, although time has rendered the film to look a little dull comparatively, are a shifting and evolving science-fictional art landscape of psychedelic and mutating imagery. The character of Dan is rotoscoped, bringing to mind the best of Bakshi, and indeed, the film seems in part almost an homage to Bakshi's Wizards, with a distinctly science fiction space opera bent instead of sword and sorcery.

Comparable films of the era, including Light Years (1987) and Time Masters, from 1982 (I have yet to see the latter, but both of them were made by René Laloux), as well as Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985) and, of course, Heavy Metal (a personal favorite), are certainly more well-known. But The Son of the Stars deserves its own place in the pantheon of animated sci-fi films with a thinking brain behind them. It may not be as action-packed as Transformers: The Movie, a heavy-metal rock fantasy relying on action and violence to electrify older kids and teens, but it has an undeniable gentle, questing, and deeply immersive soul, unconstrained by whatever threadbare limitations might show through, very rarely, in the animation itself.

One of the most interesting images here is the face of Andra O'Neill, the distressed missing outer-space pilot whose plea for help begins the film. At one point, she seems the ghost by which Dan is drawn deeper, more inexorably toward his fate—toward the battle with the Van Kleef Belt—and at the end she seems a princess in a fairy tale dream. And The Son of the Stars is the updating of a fairy story, one for a future time of space stations, AI, alien worlds, and a mercurial and fascinating ride through a landscape as dreamlike and mutated as any amidst the wonders of the stars, and beyond.

Written and directed by Mircea Toia, with Călin Cazan and Dan Chisovsky.

Fiul stelelor / Son of the Stars (Lungmetraj SF românesc, 1988) FHD 1080p

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

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