Uncovered animated eye-candy from Romania

Imagine an early Eighties Eastern European space-prog album high on sugary breakfast cereal, “Heavy Metal” magazine and 8-bit arcade games like Galaxian and Asteroids, and you have some idea of the otherworldly weirdness of the Romanian animated sci-fi film “Delta Space Mission”.

In the year 3084, a Modigliani-esque alien journalist with blue-green skin, Alma, boards a state-of-the-art spacecraft named Delta – whose highly advanced computer brain develops a mad teenage crush on her with disastrous results. An incredibly strange and strangely beautiful work of galactic eye candy, Delta Space Mission defies all rules of perspective and logic, like M.C. Escher and Moebius teaming up on a Romanian Saturday morning cartoon. Fuelled by an addictive Perry-Kingsley like electronic-synth score by Calin Ioachimescu, “Delta Space Mission” grooves along folding space and time, an early Eighties Euro-disco perched on the edge of a Black Hole.

With its egg-shaped spaceships and giant floating triangles, the film brings to mind Rene Laloux’s wonderful “Fantastic Planet” and “Masters of Time”. Long unavailable, the film has recently been scanned in 4K from the camera negative by the Romanian Film Archive and Romanian Film Centre.