Planètes [Dandelion’s Odyssey]–A Poetic Cartography of Creation Beyond Collapse

In the glimmering ashes of a world undone, where the Earth no longer whispers in chlorophyll or breathes through the lungs of forests, Planètes  offers not a lament but a hymn—a quiet psalm of regeneration. Directed by the visionary Momoko Seto, this post-apocalyptic animated poem unfurls in the silence after catastrophe, where four dandelion achenes, Dandelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa, drift across the cosmic void in search of soil, of shelter, of beginning.

It is not a tale of survival in the traditional sense, but a meditation on becoming, on love as ontological force, and on the fragile, reciprocal ecology between souls and seeds. With the clarity of a child’s gaze and the wisdom of an ancient myth, Seto delivers not just a film, but a metaphysical gesture: a cinematic entelechy in motion.

Silence as Language, Stillness as Action

There is no spoken word in Planètes. There is breath, there is pulse, there is gesture—but no voice. The absence of dialogue renders the viewer porous to affect, to resonance. It is as though the film listens back to you. In the hushed ballet of the achenes’ movement—drifting, trembling, reaching—Seto entrusts meaning to rhythm, to micro-expression, to the choreography of matter itself.

These seeds do not speak, yet they teach. Their touch, their leaning toward one another in zero gravity, becomes syntax. In this space of radical minimalism, communication arises as something pre-verbal, embodied—a vegetal grammar of empathy and co-existence. The viewer is not told what to feel, but rather allowed to remember how to feel.

The Ontology of Movement: A Journey as Genesis

Seto does not craft a linear story but a spiral—an odyssey that circles back to origin while moving outward, always becoming. The journey of the four achenes is a pilgrimage toward a fertile elsewhere, yet it is also a turning inward, a blooming in the shadow of extinction. Their mission is not conquest or colonization, but simple germination: the act of becoming-with, of rooting again, together.

Their travel through space is rendered with a gravity-defying tenderness, where the laws of physics yield to the inner laws of longing. Each moment carries the ache of nostalgia for a world lost, and yet the hope of a world not yet born. It is this tension—the simultaneity of grief and promise—that gives the film its quiet luminosity.

Seto invites us to consider: what if the end is not an ending? What if creation begins precisely when all structures collapse?

The Technology of Intimacy: Innovations in Animated Form

Technically, the film is a marvel of hybrid animation. Seto blends ultra-macro photography , time-lapse photography, robotics , and slow-motion capture

 to build an interstitial reality—neither purely digital nor natural, but something liminal. The camera becomes not merely a tool of observation but a participant in the process of becoming. It is with devotional patience that Seto films the blooming, unfolding, and decaying of flora inside a custom-built greenhouse in Burgundy—over nine painstaking months of organic time, rendered with precision and reverence.

These real-time organic phenomena are then woven into a digitally imagined space-faring narrative. The result is both tactile and transcendent. There is moss, sap, pollen—but also stars, dark matter, the cold breath of space. Seto collapses the micro and macro, the cellular and the cosmic. In doing so, she suggests a profound equivalence: that a dandelion seed landing on fertile ground is as momentous as a planet forming from dust.

This marriage of technological rigour with spiritual sensitivity gives rise to what one might call the technology of intimacy—a cinema that does not dazzle with spectacle, but invites touch, breath, communion.

Philosophy in the Key of Seed

There is something distinctly Spinozan in Seto’s vision—a sense that substance is infinite and that all things, even the smallest and most fragile, are modes of a divine unfolding. The film’s structure echoes a kind of pantheistic metaphysics: nothing is inert, everything participates. Even the void hums with potentiality.

The achenes do not conquer their new world—they collaborate with it. They do not demand, they offer. The film does not present survival as victory, but as relationship. Each action of these seeds, from forming protective membranes to spiraling in unison through stellar winds, is an act of co-becoming.

Here, love is not romantic, but ontological. It is the very condition of life’s persistence. The love between these beings is a choreography of interdependence. It is the answer to entropy.

Creation as Response, Not Reaction

In the aftermath of ecological collapse, Planètes does not advocate return, nor does it indulge in nostalgia. Instead, it speaks to a future not yet imagined—one built not upon ruins, but upon radical re-imagining. The film resists the typical aesthetic of post-apocalyptic dread. There are no wastelands here. There is only space: wide, black, generative. The void becomes a cradle.

Each image, meticulously composed, testifies to a cosmic patience—a belief that time, like a seed, must be buried before it can bloom. The pace is slow, almost meditative, forcing us to inhabit intervals rather than events. This slowness is not stagnation but contemplation. It allows the viewer to feel the texture of becoming, the embryonic swell of emergence.

A Hidden Entelechy

To watch this film is to perceive, just faintly, the presence of a hidden entelechy—the Aristotelian idea of a thing striving toward its fullest form. In, Planètes his drive is not heroic, not loud. It is barely audible. It rustles like leaves in windless air. It pulses in the almost-touch of two drifting seeds. It flickers in the bioluminescence of roots seeking soil.

This entelechy is love: not love as sentiment, but as cosmic principle. A love that creates, not because it chooses to, but because it must. Because it is what the universe does when no one is watching.

Final Reflections: A Seed in the Eye of the Storm

Planètes  is not a film to be consumed. It is a film to be dreamt. To be sat with, like an unreadable poem that nonetheless rearranges your breath. It is a seed placed in the eye of your storm, whispering not “go back,” but “begin again.”

In an age where destruction is rendered with spectacle, this quiet film reminds us that the most radical act is to nurture. To care. To begin.

Not despite the end—but because of it.

Ioannis (Yannis) Raouzaios 
©FIPRESCI