Russia Animates Ray Bradbury's "Here There Be Tygers"
There's now an incredible and delightfully trippy Soviet animation based on Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi story, "Here There Be Tygers."
The plot is simple: four explorers land on a distant planet to see if it has natural resources that can be harvested by humanity; instead, they discover that the planet is alive and provides them with their every desire.
"Here There Be Tygers" always did remind me of Stanislav Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, which is also about a sentient planet that grants the wishes of the astronauts who land upon it. Seeing both in the native Russian really accentuates the uncanny similarities. I wonder if Stanislav Lem was influenced by Bradbury?
Beautiful. I especially like the sand woman at 3:45 ;-)
I want to recommend another Ray-Bradbury-based soviet animation that is equally trippy, though in a far more dark and disturbing way: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5725857229869560639 based upon "There Will Come Soft Rains".
(-3:45, that is. Regarding the sand woman.)