“The fact that Seto manages to get this much out of what on paper sounds like a ludicrous premise confirms Dandelion’s Odyssey as an engrossing and beautifully rendered film about perseverance and working together.”

Where do dandelions come from? Not a question one thinks of every day. Could they come from outer space? That is certainly not out of the question in Japanese director Momoko Seto’s wildly inventive animated feature Dandelion’s Odyssey. If you thought getting viewers to care for a black animated cat in last year’s Oscar-winning Flow was challenging, here Seto tries to make you feel for a quartet of individual dandelion seeds, or achenes, that go on an interstellar adventure. Wordless animation of inanimate flora can’t get around a certain amount of anthropomorphizing, but Seto keeps the level relatively low enough not to be overly cute, yet just sufficient to make you at times actually care for a bunch of achenes.

Earth is devastated by a series of nuclear explosions that set the planet ablaze. Amazingly, four achenes make it out unscathed as they drift into space on their clock, that collection of white, fluffy bristles that carry the achenes on the wind. As they somehow also survive being sucked into a black hole, the foursome, which according to the film’s official description even have names, land on an icy planet not unlike the one in Interstellar. Once their new world’s frozen cloud cover starts to melt, our heroes need to deal with an everchanging environment on their search for good soil to plant themselves in. Sadly, they do not all make it, but the survivors learn that through cooperation, not just among themselves but with the emerging flora and fauna around them, the world can become a better place.

The narrative of Dandelion’s Odyssey, despite its unlikely and mum protagonists, follows the tropes of cinema’s great adventures: a crew sets out into an unknown world, forced to overcome a series of obstacles which prove fatal to some of them, and one or more survive to cross the goal line. We can even see this in the characterization of the two seeds that do not make it to the fertile grounds inside an oasis: a plump achene that can’t pull itself out of a yellow, gooey equivalent of a tar pit, and a sad achene which loses the four bristles it has left after escaping Earth’s nuclear devastation one by one, leaving it unable to move on. Much like in those great adventure movies, this odyssey is a survival of the fittest.

While it doesn’t start out that way, once water begins flowing in abundance the new planet looks very much like our own, two moons be damned. Certainly Dandelion’s Odyssey can be seen as an ode to the beauty of nature, its symbiosis, and the miracle of life. Plants start sprouting everywhere, mushrooms burst out of the ground, insects buzz around, and amphibians hop all over. The joyous nature is underlined by Quentin Sirjacq and Nicolas Becker’s fantastic score, with its influences from classical to electronica and everything in between creating suspense, sadness, and an utter joy that guides our bristle-headed heroes. The absence of humans, much like in Flow, should not go unnoticed. While the protagonists certainly find themselves in danger from time to time, much of Dandelion’s Odyssey is about working together, either with your own species or with others. The only human influence is seen in the destruction of our planet that kicks off the story.

Don’t expect the slick imagery of a Pixar or Disney in Dandelion’s Odyssey. Seto used a variety of techniques ranging from time-lapse and hyper slow motion, to ultra-macro, stackshot, and robotics, leading to an image that at times seems to come from a decade ago, but that makes it oddly more endearing than any big studio production in a long time. The animation feels very tactile, and the 2D work on the backgrounds is gorgeous. As the plant life pops, so do the colors, making it a film well-suited for a younger audience, because despite a lack of dialogue it still has a valuable life lesson for the kids, the kind you would usually get at the end of a more commercial product from the aforementioned studios. The grown-ups might feel the film drag at times and become repetitive as the protagonists move from one hairy situation to another, but the fact that Seto manages to get this much out of what on paper sounds like a ludicrous premise confirms Dandelion’s Odyssey as an engrossing and beautifully rendered film about perseverance and working together.