# Les Maîtres du temps

Les Maîtres du temps (lit. The Masters of Time, a.k.a. Time Masters; Herrscher der Zeit in German; Az idő urai in Hungarian) is a 1982 independent animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux and designed by Mœbius. It is based on the 1958 science fiction novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (The Orphan of Perdide) by Stefan Wul.
The film centres on a boy, Piel, who is stranded on Perdide, a desert planet where giant killer hornets live. He awaits rescue by the space pilot Jaffar, the exiled prince Matton, his sister Belle and Jaffar's old friend Silbad who are trying to reach Perdide and save Piel before it is too late.

## Plot

A man named Claude drives a vehicle across the planet Perdide. He sends a message to his friend Jaffar, telling him that his wife Annie was killed by indigenous monster hornets. After a crash wrecks his vehicle and he cannot extricate himself, Claude lets his son Piel down from the wreckage and hands him an interstellar transceiver, telling him that it is named "Mike" and will talk to him, and to do whatever Mike tells him to do. After Claude sends Piel to the Dolongs, a nearby forest which repulses the hornets, the vehicle explodes.
On his spaceship, Jaffar receives Claude's last message. Before heading for Perdide, he decides to seek out his friend Silbad, who has experience in living on Perdide. Jaffar's passengers, Prince Matton and his sister, Princess Belle, have been deposed from their planet; they bring with them a treasure the Prince took along to fund his restoration. Matton hates being diverted.
Jaffar, Silbad, Matton and Belle begin communicating with Piel to give him advice. On Silbad's planet, they witness the metamorphosis of an organism into multiple empathic, sentient homunculi, two of whom, Yula and Jad, stow away on Jaffar's spacecraft seeking adventure. Yula and Jad are depicted playing with the treasure. Matton nearly convinces Piel to drown himself in a lake, but is discovered by Belle. She stuns Matton and talks Piel to safety. It is strongly implied that Belle recommends ejecting the treasure via the airlock (presumably over ejecting Matton himself), in order to deprive Matton of his motivation for harming Piel. Yula and Jad undertake the jettisoning of the treasure.
Confined to the brig, Matton rages and threatens murder if he is not released. Yula and Jad, being psychic, find his raging unbearable, and conspire to help Matton escape with the expectation that he will flee to the nearby Gamma 10 and be done away with by a hostile entity which resides there.
From the bridge, the other crew are alerted to Matton's escape in the ship's stolen shuttlecraft, and Jaffar gives chase in an emergency capsule. On the surface of Gamma 10, Matton encounters beings which appear as visually identical angels. The beings capture both Matton and Jaffar and escort them to imprisonment. Yula and Jad, who had stowed away in the emergency capsule, slip into Jaffar's cell and warn him: the hostile entity is a being of pure thought who mentally dominates other lifeforms, causing them to lose all sense of individuality and become its puppets, the white angels. They attempt to free Jaffar, but are unable to before his captors return, and so instruct Jaffar that he can avoid being assimilated by resisting and exuding all the hate and contempt they can muster, though the act will likely destroy both the entity and Jaffar with it. Jaffar insists that he would rather die than live on as a slave.
In a ritualistic ceremony, the white angels bring Matton and Jaffar before the entity. In the time they are together, Jaffar proposes they fight the white angels together, at least taking some down before being overwhelmed. Jaffar reveals that the true enemy is the entity, and tells him of the fatal method to fight and resist it. Matton, expressing a melancholy over his own worth, seems to become resolved to the cost. When they approach the entity, Matton shoves Jaffar aside, pleading for him to look after Belle before sacrificing himself, in an apparent gesture of atonement. Perhaps uniquely suited to self-loathing, Matton successfully 'opposes unity', destroying the entity and himself. Upon the destruction, the white angels revert to their original selves, a varied group of humans and other species. The stronghold of the entity collapses and explodes in a cataclysm, and Matton is last observed by Jaffar to be writhing in agony, ensnared in flaming tentacles.
Yula and Jad, directed by Jaffar to return the shuttle to the ship, are able to rescue Jaffar and the former captives from the collapsing stronghold, taking them onboard Jaffar's ship. Meanwhile, Piel befriends a local creature, a hyponiterix, which accompanies him. A patrol cruiser of the Interplanetary Reform catches up with Jaffar's ship, pursuing the royals and the treasure Matton stole. Jaffar considers that the rescued spacefarers from Gamma 10 should hijack the Reform cruiser and take it for themselves. During the discussion of this plan, one of the rescued from Gamma 10, Onyx the Digeed of Gnaz, is revealed to be able to change his shape to resemble any object. Onyx will impersonate the missing treasure, allowing the escapees to access the Reformist ship.
Jaffar's vessel is boarded, and as he presents the "captured" pirates and the fake treasure to the Reform commander, no one can converse with Piel, who begins to wander without supervision. Jaffar's crew later attempt to contact Piel, who has lost his transceiver and the hyponiterix inside a cave filled with predatory tentacles. Despondent, Piel wanders back to the lakeside, which takes him out of the forest, and is attacked by the hornets which killed his parents. Jaffar's ship closes on her destination, but the planet is being transported through time by a race of aliens known as the Masters of Time. Perdide and everything on it, including Piel, is sent back 60 years through time.
The effect of time travel renders the unprotected crew of Jaffar's ship unconscious. They awake in a space-station, where they have been treated, but Silbad is dying. Yula and Jad telepathically discover that Silbad is actually a now-elderly Piel. At the time Perdide was displaced, Piel was nearly killed by the hornets before a passing spacefarer, who was investigating this recently appearing planet, came to his rescue. However, due to his trauma, Piel lost his childhood memories. Shortly after this revelation, Silbad dies. His funeral is attended by a Master of Time.

## Differences from the novel

The motion picture story is based on the novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (1958) by the French writer Stefan Wul.
In the original novel, the character of Piel was also named Claude, like his father. Laloux changed this to distinguish father and son.

## Cast
### Original

* Jaffar - Jean Valmont
* Silbad - Michel Elias
* Piel - Frédéric Legros
* Matton - Yves-Marie
* Belle - Monique Thierry
* Claude - Sady Rebbot
* Jad - Patrick Baujin
* Yula - Pierre Tourneur
* Xul - Alain Cuny
* Général - Yves Brainville
* Igor - Michel Barbey

### English

* Ray Brooks

## Production

The BBC (who were co-producers) aired an English-language dubbed version in 1987 and 1991 called Time Masters, featuring, amongst others, the voice of Ray Brooks.
Directed by René Laloux, the film was produced largely at the Pannonia Film Studio in Hungary. The visual design was based on the art of Mœbius, otherwise known as Jean Giraud.

## Home media

Several versions have been released on DVD:
* A French edition (ASIN: B00017O6KM, two-disc collectors edition) which was released in 2004 and has no English subtitles.
* A German edition (ASIN: B004C5L4X6, single-disc edition) released on 11 November 2010 and another German edition (ASIN: B001I9ZML4, single-disc edition) released on 3 November 2008.
* The out-of-print single-disc edition released in the US in 2000 (ASIN: B00004S8A2) is in French with English subtitles.
* UK distributor Eureka! released a restored, wide-screen and English-subtitled version of the film as part of its Masters of Cinema series on 22 October 2007.