Planet Unknown
2016 · 9m
Directed by Shawn Wang
Genres: adventure, animation, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
At the end of the 21st century, with Earth's resources nearly exhausted, robotic rovers are sent across space to search for habitable planets. Two rovers explore an unknown world in hopes of finding a future home for humanity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent post-scarcity meditation dressed up as sci-fi adventure, which is fine, but Wang plays it so straight that the real subversive move—two machines caring more about Earth's extinction than we do—gets buried under pretty animation instead of weaponized.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of Kurosawa's contemplative humanism-through-observation, with a restrained color palette and editing rhythm that trusts silence; a formally assured work that understands how animation can deepen philosophical distance rather than collapse it.
Wang's choice to let the rovers' interaction breathe through negative space and minimal dialogue—letting their mechanical whirring and the planet's ambient soundscape carry emotional weight—transforms what could've been a generic survival plot into something genuinely touching and strange.