TIME MASTERS (1982) Is Unstreamable
An underseen masterpiece of animation.
Welcome to Unstreamable! A column where I, arts writer and Scarecrow librarian Jas Keimig, recommend films and shows you can’t watch on major streaming services in the United States.
Got a recommendation for Unstreamable? Gimme the scoop at unstreamablemovies@gmail.com.
TIME MASTERS (LES MAÎTRES DU TEMPS)
France, 1982, 78 min, Dir. René Laloux
René Laloux’s Time Masters plays like a Sunday morning animation serial on acid. There are giant angry hornets, sexy buff faceless angels controlled by a void-like alien, psychic gnomes shaped like Tic Tacs, and an adorable boy named Piel lost on a hostile planet waiting for his rescuers to part space and time to save him from the known unknown. While its shape may resemble a children’s animated TV show, there’s a through line of existential horror and real peril (the film was based off of Stefan Wul’s 1958 book The Orphan of Perdide). Plus, it’s just so dang gorgeous — the entire film is based off the designs of French artist Jean Giraud a.k.a. Mœbius. It’s stunning and psychedelic, fleshing out a visual world that feels fresh even today.
Time Masters was Laloux’s follow up to his smash hit Fantastic Planet (also based off a Wul novel), and he worked with Hungarian production studio Pannónia Stúdió in Budapest to bring his and Mœbius’s vision to life. According to the film’s press notes, a rushed timeline, lack of resources, and fickle translators led Laloux to feel ultimately dissatisfied with the final product. The tension between the seemingly kid-oriented animation style and complex sci-fi storytelling was also confusing to contemporary (and even current) audiences, though — as with many unstreamable titles — those very attributes led it to develop a cult following in the U.S.
Two years ago, Janus dropped a 4K restoration in theaters but there’s been no update as to whether this animation gem will make the leap to Blu-ray or 4K (a used copy will run you about $100 online and many are Region B-coded). Here’s hoping that the recently announced 4K restoration of Laloux’s Gandahar will spur Janus to finally make this animation great more accessible to all us physical media nerds.
Find it in the Animation room in the Laloux, René section. Right now is lives in the Staff Picks section because my colleague Claire and I have elite taste!
FROM THE UNSTREAMABLE ARCHIVE (AKA 2021)
HIGH TIDE
Australia, 1987, 101 min, Dir. Gillian Armstrong
Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide is full of the color blue. The sky over the village on the coast of New South Wales makes out with the dark sea just beneath it. The lights in the diners where villagers eat their meals puke the cool tone. The disposition of central character Lili (the wonderful Judy Davis) is also decidedly blue. She inhabits the screen in a hardened but wily way, low-key mourning the death of her husband and resigned to touring the continent as a backup singer to an Elvis impersonator, another famous lover of the color blue.
But when Lili’s car (also blue-ish) breaks down and leaves her stranded in a seaside town near the Australian coast, she unwittingly chances upon her teen daughter Ally (Claudia Karvan), whom she abandoned as a baby. Lili secretly spies on her estranged daughter from a distance, taking up residence in the same trailer park, watching Ally clumsily shave her ankles in a shower stall, observing her with some knuckle-headed boy. Ally’s nan tries to bat Lili off, but the pull of a mother toward her daughter proves too great to overcome. Though the tale skews melodramatic in parts, it’s a tender study of grief and motherhood, all told in hues of blue. —2021
Find it in the Directors section under Armstrong, Gillian.
IN OTHER NEWS…
Unstreamable has our last screening of the summer: TEKKONKINKREET in 4K, August 21-22 at Northwest Film Forum. Cop tickets soon! Also kicking off that same weekend at the Forum is a double feature of Gregg Araki’s THREE BEWILDERED PEOPLE IN THE NIGHT and a 4K restoration of MYSTERIOUS SKIN. Heavy!! But I’ll see you at both :)
The good folks over at Indiewire deemed Seattle as the city with the best local indie film community. Hell yeah!
Got some tapes you need to offload? Head down to White Center for a VHS tape swap hosted by the always excellent horror-themed physical media store Tomb of Treasure on August 9.
And for Pioneer Square Art Walk on Thursday, August 6, the gallery at King Street Station is debuting A Legacy Illuminated: Black Theater in the Pacific Northwest which highlights the influence of Black theater group Black Arts West on Seattle’s theater scene in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.
A RANDOM SCARECROW FIND
Didn’t have a chance to watch this yet, but if you see me kinda glowing in the next few weeks…you’ll know why.
Looking for more? Browse our big list of 400+ hard-to-find movies over on our website.
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. Yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.