Planetary Traveler

Produced and Directed by Jan C. Nickman
by Eric Johnson

Let me set the stage a little. A few years ago a computer animation extravaganza entitled Beyond the Mind’s Eye was released on video and it was well-received and it won an Emmy and a lot of people were very impressed. I was not one of them. The good part was that there are simply amazing things that can be accomplished with the computer – mechanical objects and landscpaes can be rendered with almost frightening realism, and when that kind of stuff was on the screen the work was very impressive. The bad part of Beyond the Mind’s Eye was the fact that this wonderful environment was populated by the most hideous and clunky stick figures (their eyes and lips floating free of their spherical heads, limbs not even attached to their fragmented bodies), the disfigured refugees of a Salvador Dali-inspired holocaust. It was the presence of these grotesque forms that shattered the illusion of reality created by those wonderful environments. In just a couple of frames, everything that was wonderful and everything that still had a long way to go in computer animation was thrown up on the screen for all to see. I have always been somewhat curious to see what would happen if all those incredible environments were explored and the metallic-skinned dancing girls were left home for a while.

Planetary Traveler was created by the same man, Jan C. Nickman, who created the Mind’s Eye series and is similar to his earlier projects to the extent that it is an experiment in a developing medium rather than an animated film with characters and plot. The video, released by Third Planet Entertainment, consists of the “visual light logs” of an alien race, left behind after they explored a solar system with eight planets and then broke on through to the next plane of reality. What you get is forty minutes of spectacular alien landscapes; there are raging volcanoes, frozen seas, and rock formations unlike anything ever seen on this planet, all rendered with an eerie realism that suggests that they could exist somewhere else even if none of us have ever seen them. It’s as if the last twenty minutes of 2001 were taken, created again with today’s technology and set to a soothing new age soundtrack.

I enjoyed this video a great deal and recommend it highly as something to keep as one of those video oddities kept in the collection for the precise moment, in the right company, when it is the only appropriate viewing material. If you are so inclined, Planetary Traveler is probably some of the best hallucinogenic-enhancing material I can think of. In fact, I think that hospitals and college dormitories should keep a copy of this video on file in the event of the occasional psychedelic sensory-overload victim. Anybody interested in animation should check this out just to see what the medium is capable of if manipulated properly. The kind of people who would be attracted to this kind of video know who they are. This is an exciting video, as if a new exhibit has been opened in the museum of animation filled with the stink of promise for the future.