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Released by: Def Crocodile
Released on: April 26th, 2022.
Director: Mircea Toia, Călin Cazan
Cast: N/A
Year: 1984
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Delta Space Mission – Movie Review:
Set in the far flung future of the year 3084 after mankind has settled the outer reaches of space, the Romanian animated sci-fi film Delta Space Mission introduces us to a green-skinned alien named Alma. As a journalist, her latest assignment sees her board the Delta, a technologically advanced space ship controlled by a brilliant computer brain set off to explore and research a newly discovered galaxy.
It isn’t long after Alma’s arrival that the weird computer brain of the Delta starts to do what a computer brain shouldn’t be able to do – fall in love with her. Alma and the ship’s captain do start to notice that the computer has been acting of its own accord lately, but as it falls more and more in love with Alma, it starts to act up in dangerous ways.
Running a brisk seventy minutes, Delta Space Force is set to an absolutely killer synth score by composer Calin Ioachimescu that does a perfect job of capturing the weird mood and tone that Mircea Toia and Călin Cazan were (probably) going for with this production. Not quite as trippy as Fantastic Planet, a film that it feels like a kindred spirit to, Delta Space Force may share some obvious thematic links with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but it never feels like a rip off of either movie. It very much has its own thing going on, both visually and in terms of how its story plays out.
The animation style employed in the film is somehow both simple and complex at the same time. In some scenes the anthropomorphic characters don’t tend to have eyeballs, which give them a seriously weird look, and at times things like hair have no texture but are rendered as a simple, colored shape. At the same time, the animators will pay close attention to beads of sweat as they drip off of a characters face. Sometimes the backgrounds are just basic, single colors while other times they are fairly complex, and genuinely beautiful, watercolor pieces. The non-anthropomorphic creature design is also very strange, the movie focusing at one point on a sort of giant, slug-like creature.
It’s all very strange and probably a film enjoyed in a certain enhanced state of mind, but even without certain enhancements, it can absolutely be enjoyed as a family-friendly picture. It plays out more as a series of vignettes and less like a lengthy, linear plot and it doesn’t always make tons of sense, but the visuals are so cool and the score so great that you can just enjoy it for the wonderful work of bizarro-world art that it is and leave it at that.
Delta Space Mission – Blu-ray Review:
Def Crocodile brings Delta Space Mission to Region A Blu-ray famed at 1.33.1 fullframe and presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Taken from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative by the Romanian Film Archive and CNC – Romanian Film Centre, with digital restoration by Craig Rogers of Deaf Crocodile Films, the picture quality on this disc is excellent. The colors look amazing and detail is about as strong as the original animated source material would likely allow for. There are no problems with any compression artifacts nor is there really much in the way of print damage here at all, the picture is almost shockingly clean, while still retaining some natural film grain.
Audio chores are handled by a Romania language 24-bit LPCM 2.0 Mono track. Optional subtitles are provided in English only. No problems to note here, the track is clean and nicely balanced. Free of any hiss, distortion of sibilance it does a nice job bringing some depth to the score and effects work.
Extras begin with a commentary track by Kat Ellinger that goes into some detail about the history of Eastern European animated features, the influence of more traditional fairy tales, details on the film’s two directors and insight into their work and more.
Also included on the disc is a new forty-one minute interview with the film’s co-director, Călin Cazan, that covers how the project came to be, influences that worked their way into the movie, the state of Romanian cinema when the movie was made, the restoration work that went into getting the movie back into the minty fresh shape we see it in on this disc and how he feels about how the film has been received over the years.
If that weren’t enough, the good people at Def Crocodile have also included two newly restored episodes from the Delta Spaced Mission short film series. The first of this is “Planeta Oceanelor (The Planet Of The Oceans) from 1980 and the second is “Recuperare ratata (Failed Towing)”, from 1981, both running seven minutes and directed by Victor Antonescu.
Menus and chapter selection options are provided on the disc as well and it comes packaged with some cool reversible cover sleeve art a great insert booklet containing an essay on the film by none other than Stephen Bissette.
Delta Space Mission - The Final Word:
Delta Space Mission is an lovably weird film, seventy minutes of frequently eyeball melting animation set to a fantastic score that proves to be plenty entertaining. Def Crocodile’s Blu-ray release is a good one and should prove a welcome addition to the home video collection of anyone who can enjoy the stranger, less conventional side of animated films.