‘Dandelion’s Odyssey’ review: Artistic animation takes a plant’s eye-view of the apocalypse

Dir: Momoko Seto. France/Belgium. 2025. 76 mins

Four dandelion seeds – or ‘achenes’ to give them their scientific name – embark on a remarkable journey when a nuclear apocalypse destroys their home on Earth in Momoko Seto’s inventive, dialogue-free feature debut. Propelled into the stratosphere, the buddies are sucked through a black hole and eventually find themselves on a new planet. That’s just the beginning of the voyage as they must dodge voracious floating tadpoles, hitch rides on slugs and work together to seek out fertile ground in which to plant their roots.

An immersive and often beguiling visual experience

This is not the first animation to take an environmental catastrophe as its jumping-off point. But with its creative blend of 3D computer animation and time lapse nature photography, it is one of the more strikingly original pictures to imagine life after the end of the world. While it’s admittedly not the most gripping piece of storytelling, the film is an immersive and often beguiling visual experience. 

Dandelion’s Odyssey screens in Annecy’s main competition having premiered as the closing film of Cannes’ Critics’ Week, where it won the Fipresci Prize. The film builds on techniques that Seto developed in several of her short films – including Planet Z (2011) and Planet Sigma (2015), both of which launched in Berlin – and also blended macro photography and time lapse footage of plants, insects and animals to create sci-fi fantasy worlds. This feature, which will be released by Gébéka Films in France with the title Planètes, is a fascinating curio which could connect with a similar audience to that of Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s study of insect life in miniature, Microcosmos. 

It’s something of an ask to require an audience to empathise with dandelion seeds and, for part of the film at least, a pair of glutinous brown slugs – not least because anyone with a garden will regard both as mortal enemies. But through smart use of sound and music, plus deft character design, Seto manages to imbue each of the achenes with a distinct personality. (In the supporting literature, the seeds are given names which are never used in the film.)

Sturdy Dendelion is the leader, the boldest and most adventurous; Baraban has a larger seed, which makes it cumbersome and slow; Léonto has just four pappi (the tiny hairs that help the seeds to fly) and loses them one by one in moments of stress and Taraxa’s stalk is curved, giving it a diffident, uncertain quality. Although the seeds don’t speak they are given voices; fluting, ethereal and melodic, they sound a little like the pink knitted aliens in Oliver Postgate’s animated TV series, The Clangers.

The score, by Quentin Sirjacq and Nicolas Becker, and Becker’s sound design are crucial elements in the storytelling, with the diverse approaches and instruments capturing the tone of each chapter of the adventure. Some sections use the wistfully percussive qualities of the gamelan, others are electronic and a full orchestra is pressed into service for certain scenes, including an exultant waltz that closes the film. 

The most distinctive element, however, is the photography. Stop motion footage of lichen, moss, fungi and plants, shot over weeks and months, is used to create an oddly persuasive alien world. The dandelion seeds hitch a lift on the back of a couple of slugs, escaping a fast-spreading fungal network; toadstools, shot from underneath, sprout into city-sized edifices. It’s oddly beautiful and slightly sinister. There’s a lightness to the film, which plays fast and loose with the laws of physics, with giant cuttlefish swimming in outer space and huge, voracious tadpoles that can float above the water.