Les Maîtres du temps

Infobox_Film
name = Les Maîtres du temps


caption =
director = René Laloux
Tibor Hernádi (technical director)
procuder = Miklós Salunsinsky
writer = Moebius
René Laloux
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Stefan Wul
starring = Jean Valmont
Michel Elias
Frédéric Legros
Yves-Marie Maurin
Monique Thierry
Sady Rebbot
music = Jean-Pierre Bourtayre
Pierre Tardy
Christian Zanesi
cinematography = Zoltán Bacsó
András Klausz
Mihály Kovács
Árpád Lossonczy
special effects = Sándor Reisenbüchler
background design = István Bányai, István Orosz
editing = Dominique Boischot
distributor = Image Entertainment
released = flagicon|France March 24, 1982
runtime = 79 minutes
country = FRA
language = French
website = http://perdide.free.fr/site/
amg_id = 1:99346
imdb_id = 0084315|

"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 live, 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 series 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 Mœbius, 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.

ee also

*List of animated feature films

External links

*imdb title|0084315
* [http://perdide.free.fr French fan site]
* [http://www.herrscherderzeit.de Multilingual fan site]
* [http://socketdesign.co.uk/andcream/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=206&Itemid=44 Review] of the English-dubbed version
* [http://palais.wikidot.com/les-maitres-du-temps-videography List] of DVD releases