A Brief History of Time and Fantastic Planet

"A Brief History of Time" was a great documentary that served as both a guide to the mind-stretching ideas of Stephen Hawking, complete with elegant pencil sketch illustration, and a profile of the scientist himself. There were interviews with him as well as people who knew him. It was never boring and the interviews were insightful.

From one mind-stretch to another: "Fantastic Planet," aka La Planète Savage, a 1973 animated movie in which humans have become pets of a colonizing race of huge blue aliens. The movie is French, but the animation is Czech. Made post-Prague Spring, they certainly had an idea of what it would be like to be invaded and oppressed by outsiders. I loved the hand animation, which was beautiful and strange. It is a unique movie. It's certainly a bit of a relic in some ways - it definitely has 1973 vibes and I bet hippies loved it. Blue aliens nowadays conjure Avatar, and I found it really interesting that it was sort of an Avatar in reverse - rather than the colonizing humans ruining the Navi planet, the Draag treated humans "the Om," a play on the French word for man, "homme," like uncomprehending rodents. Humans succeed through education, a message I feel like you don't see often enough.