Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FANTASTIC PLANET is a splashy French animated science-fiction story. The animation is slightly halting, the style derived a little from the late Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (TIME, April 11, 1972) and owing quite a lot to Edward Gorey. The script is too much in the debt of a lot of standard sci-fi ideas, most prominently the notion that there is a distant planet where humans are kept as pets or treated as wild animals by the native humanoid types. Fantastic Planet is about how the humans win their independence and all creatures come to live in harmony...
...foundation of this airy palace of fiction (Boucher was far too rational, too much a Frenchman of the 18th century, ever to confuse art with reality) was, inevitably, the female nude, for which Boucher discovered a fresh convention. Since the chill goddesses of the Fontainebleau school in the 16th century, the nude in French art had retained some measure of Gothic proportion- elongated torso, small high breasts - and a distinct aura of remoteness. Boucher's nude was small, full and rounded: a compact little machine à plaisir, borne up like a plump rose on tumultuous puffs of cloud...
...Gerald Ham, president of the Society of American Archivists, insists: "I think it is a fiction that these are private papers. The very great bulk of these papers originate from one activity only -that of serving in a public capacity. I think they should be public papers." A 1969 study for the American Historical Association put the case even more strongly. The association said that the concept that a President's papers became his property after leaving office was "a lingering vestige of the attributes of monarchy, not an appropriate or compatible concept... for the head of a democratic...
...menacing form depicted in this dramatic photograph is not some giant glob of man-eating protoplasm from a science-fiction film. It is actually a hamster's kidney cell magnified 15,000 times by a scanning electron microscope. Such scientific snapshots taken by Caltech Biologist Jean-Paul Revel may offer an important clue to a mystery that has long puzzled scientists: how a living cell moves across a surface. The cell's perambulations, Revel says, are apparently made possible by a strange phenomenon called "ruffling...
...civilization on the head of a pun, with a little room to spare. That quality has helped make him one of the best popular critics going, as well as the editor of the New York Times Book Review section, but takes some getting used to in Leonard's fiction. In Black Conceit, for example, Leonard offers three different major characters: New Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy, a nice enough Texas girl caught in the coils of biology and history...