Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer/Music/Animation – Michel Rousseau. Production Company – The Movie Agency.
Voices
Cerise Rousseau (Rose), Emilie Rosseau (Leah), Michel Rousseau (Arthur/Professor Herbert/Gustave/Monsieur Deguise), Terence Rosseau (Richard/King of the World)
Plot
Paris, 1901. Professor Herbert defies scientific convention and announces a plan to fly to explore the Antarctic in the steam-powered airship he has built. He selects a crew to accompany him. They set forth to the Antarctic but end up crashing. Exploring the terrain, they find a cave system that leads to the underground world of Agartha.
Terra Incognita 1901 was the second film from French filmmaker Michel Rousseau who appears to perform all of the roles behind the camera himself. Rousseau also conducts several of the voice roles, while the rest of the cast appear to be filled out with family members (an assumption in that all of the voice actors have the surname of Rousseau). Rousseau had previously made the SF film Vortex, The Reign of Sovereignty (2021), made in a similar computer-animated style. Outside of that, Rousseau works as a voice actor.
Terra Incognita 1901 is a full-fledged venture into Steampunk, the genre of fiction based on imaging alternate Victorian technologies based on steam power, which emerged in the 1980s and has become a real-world fashion and counter-culture fad in recent years. (I have an essay on film examples here at Steampunk Films). France had previously ventured into Steampunk with the also animated April and the Extraordinary World (2015) to which Terra Incognita 1901 has some similarities, particularly in the design of an alternate Steampunk Belle Epoque Paris with trams that run through the sky on cables.
For an independent, non-studio production, I was very impressed with the quality of animation on Terra Incognita 1901. The opening scenes in Paris come with an almost photorealistic detail and a field of depth like they are real places being visited. That said, this starts to flag in later scenes once the party reach the Antarctic where Rousseau fails to maintain the quality. Also the human figures here and in earlier scene don’t quite move or bend with fluid animation. Nevertheless, the results are quite impressive. The design work that has gone into the film is fantastic from the motorised Cinderella Coach that Leah turns up in to the cable car tram that runs through the clouds to the unveiling of the professor’s steam airship.
On the other hand, when the film reaches the Antarctic and ventures into Agartha, it becomes something different altogether. Here your expectation is that it will fall into the lines of a Lost World Adventure or a Centre of the Earth and Underground Adventure. Surprisingly though, Rousseau seems almost disinterested in what the party find. Instead, the film becomes something along the lines of a children’s adventure and almost seems to be heading in the directions of Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). However, this never happens either.
There are sections with the party encountering moderately imaginatively designed monsters – a modernised Medusa, something with tentacles coming out of its face, a dragon with crystalline scales, and Rousseau revealing he is a fan of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and serving up swordfights with animated skeletons. However, the scenes where the four characters realise they are allegorically conquering their fears feel very different to the Steampunk film we started watching. The film reaches an abrupt ending without Agartha even being explored.
It feels like Rousseau needed help with the plotting. Scenes seem to skip along at times leaving you not knowing why characters ended up where they are. It is not made clear why the professor seems to be acting as an agent for Agartha and why he has brought everybody together – in many ways, the end of the film feels like it is a set-up for a sequel. There are a sinister group pursuing and others that zip about and teleport, but we get to know nothing about who they are. The other issue with Terra Incognita 1901 would be that too many of the characters look similar – both of the lead female characters come with very anachronistic and identical spiky dyed short haircuts.
Trailer here