Biblical scholars and theologians use “antediluvian” to describe the world of Genesis between the fall from Eden and the flood. Literally meaning “before the flood,” the word packs grand meta-narratives of historical and cosmological significance: humans fumbled the chance to live in paradise for good and brought down our world with it. Disaster awaits, monsters lurk. The beauty of the original creation still radiates brightly in the meantime. This is the world that Momoko Seto’s Dandelion’s Odyssey drops into. Four dandelion achenes — named Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto, and Taraxa in the marketing notes — survive the end of our paradise and toil through space, evade danger of both seasonal and lifeform varieties, before eventually rekindling their species on another planet. Yes, you read that right: this is an animated film without words about dandelion seeds traversing the cosmos in search of a new home.
For a fleeting moment, the natural world looks peacefully Edenic. Two dandelion balls capture Seto’s attention, tilting slightly with the wind and reacting with a smidge of anthropomorphism to their surroundings. The green and lustrous world they inhabit is so peaceful that it disturbs, and the droneish score helps to facilitate that uncomfortable feeling as vague sounds punctuate the music to scratch a sci-fi itch. Eventually, the flood comes. Red balls fly through the periphery and crash in the distance, the world engulfed in red atomic terror. One dandelion ball floats above the fire and into deep space. The ball has no chance against the uncertainty and vastness of the galaxy, and it gradually loses its shape. Only the four seeds remain.
The animated seeds move not unlike the food characters in Veggie Tales, with their cluelessness and kitschy bobbing. They are human enough to react to the dangers before them with movements of their own, and plant enough to never speak. It’s a weird lane to occupy, and made even weirder with the stylized animation that still undoubtedly leans toward photorealism, even if the cinematography doesn’t always. Any verisimilitude undergirding the photorealism is abolished just moments into the film as the dandelion survives flight into outer space and floats past giant space squids.
The entire odyssey breezes by. The film lasts only a quick 75 minutes, and there are more location pit stops than your average Fast and Furious film, making each minute feel shorter than 60 seconds. But the dandelion’s venture into space as it breezes past our moon and away from our sun misses the opportunity to deliver an emotional effect. Any sense of isolation, wonder, desperation, or fear dies with the planet. Audiences need to spend time in space to feel its isolation, and the same goes for any other chapter in the odyssey for that matter — but the time lapse cameras and effects Seto relies on try to cheat by erasing the effect of time passing while still reaping the benefits. Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman quite humorously once said, “When most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment—for them—is to say, ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death. There’s some of that, I think. And that’s why there’s so much resistance. I took two hours of someone’s life.” Seto and Akerman aim for totally different projects, of course, and these differences might force an unfair comparison, but Akerman’s artistic relationship to time points to a larger truth about cinema’s intrinsic and manipulative relationship to time. Feeling its passing in Dandelion’s Odyssey would have left the achenes’ journey more freighted with meaning.
The end trajectory for the dandelions is technically that of an invasive species. From a biodiversity standpoint, they threaten their new home. Empathy translates the environmental risk into a story of refuge. The homeless Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto, and Taraxa hang onto their life — or, technically, the possibility of life, since they are seeds — by a thread until they secure a new place to belong. The motivating impulse for Seto appears to be more about the interdependence of life on earth. The directed stated in an interview for Cannes’ La Semaine de la Critique that she hopes audiences take away “That nature is not a backdrop to be trampled, that it is not separate from the self, that all the little things that surround us are the actors of an action film, that a growing plant is so beautiful that it can make you cry. We are all a force of nature, bound to one another, and together we make up our planet.” This means the film works better as a metaphor for lost humans than anything to do with other lifeforms, however, especially with rising global conservatism about refugees and migrants. The seeds, totally dependent on systems outside of their control, can do nothing but blow away with the wind and hope for the best. Their fate lies outside of their hands; their ability to find belonging is something they have no ability to manipulate.
The film’s French title is Planètes and directly places the animated journey in continuity with Seto’s Planet shorts: Planet A, Planet Z, Planet ∑, and Planet ∞. All of those films bridge the natural world, and in particular evince a fixation on smaller life forms, with semi-experimental animation influenced by nature documentaries. Seto has also made a series of animal-lovemaking films that she labels “porn” on her website. Unfortunately, too little of that ambition and nerve has touched her latest project. Dandelion’s Odyssey may begin with nuclear destruction and the end of the Anthropocene, but it’s nonetheless a far tamer outing than viewers can find in the director’s other work.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.