The Time Masters: the weird, beautiful French sci-fi I’m finally revisiting

I first saw Time Masters (Les Maîtres du temps) in my early teen years, and it grabbed my attention immediately.

Not simply because of the visuals, or the title, but because it was different. Very different...

It looked nothing like the cartoons I’d grown up with on TV or in theaters. This was before I’d even stumbled into Akira, Nausicaä or Robotech—back when “animation” mostly meant one familiar lane: Disney, Warner Bros. or Hanna-Barbera. And then this showed up, looking like it came from a completely different universe.

So this past Christmas, I did what any reasonable middle-aged guy does when nostalgia starts tugging at his sleeve: I put it on my wish list. A few days ago, it finally landed in my hands. I wasn’t sure what I’d find. Was the magic just nostalgia doing its thing? Or was the film really as special as I remembered?

Either way, I hit play.

I wasn’t disappointed.

What it’s about

On the planet Perdide, a kid named Piel is left alone after a catastrophe. His only lifeline is a remote voice link, while a rescue crew tries to reach him before the planet (and everything on it) finishes the job. That setup sounds simple… until the story reminds you it's not.

Why the film still matters

Time Masters still works because its ambition is baked into every decision—even when the budget and the tools & technology clearly had limits. It comes out of that Métal Hurlant moment, when French science fiction had a chip on its shoulder and something to prove. It didn’t want to imitate Disney. It wanted to be its own strange, poetic thing.

On the surface, the story looks simple: a rescue mission, a child stranded on a hostile planet, a race against time. But the film quietly reshapes that familiar setup into something far more unsettling. Time becomes unreliable. Cause and effect blur. Characters are shaped by events they don’t yet understand.

The question stops being “will they save the kid?” and becomes “what does it mean to grow, change, and survive when the universe doesn’t play by human rules?”

Part of the film’s strange energy comes from the fact that it feels pulled in two visual directions at once.

On one side, you can still feel René Laloux’s earlier work on Fantastic Planet (La planète sauvage - 1973) lurking in the background. That film was far weirder, harsher, and more alienating—deeply uncomfortable in how indifferent its universe feels. 

Time Masters is clearly more approachable, but traces of that cold, unsettling sensibility remain: in the pacing, in the way danger isn’t always signposted, and in the sense that survival doesn’t come with moral guarantees.

Pulling in the other direction is Moebius’ design work. His clean lines, organic technology, and surreal imagery give the film a lighter, almost inviting surface. Worlds feel grown rather than engineered. Creatures don’t map cleanly onto familiar sci-fi archetypes. Even faces—or the absence of them—carry meaning, hinting at impersonal systems quietly shaping individual lives.

The result is a film that never fully settles into one visual or emotional register. It looks soft but thinks hard. It feels accessible, yet slightly unmoored. That push and pull—between Laloux’s colder, more alien instincts and Moebius’ poetic surrealism—is a big part of why Time Masters feels so quietly strange.

And then there’s the film’s real trump card: a late reveal that reframes everything you’ve seen. Not with spectacle or shock, but with quiet inevitability. The story clicks into place and reveals itself as not just pretty or unusual, but deeply intelligent.

Even if parts of the animation feel stiff by today’s standards, Time Masters survives because it reaches for something bigger than polish. It aims for wonder, dread, and poetry—and it actually sticks the landing.

My take — TL;DR

This is the kind of film you revisit with a tiny bit of fear, because nostalgia can be a liar with good manners. But Time Masters has something nostalgia can’t fabricate from scratch: a real sci-fi spine, a surreal visual identity, and that very French, very “we’re going to try this even if it’s odd” creative confidence. It still hits the way I remember, not because it’s “perfect," but because it’s singular—and we don’t get enough singular anymore. 

If you ever decide to give it a watch, please let me know your thoughts!