You may not know it but the Black Sea-bordered country of Romania has a vast and varied film history. As far back as 1898, Romanian cinemas screened original works and early Lumiere shorts. In actuality, the first true Romanian filmmaker was Gheorgze Marinescu. Marinescu was a doctor who turned his medical work and surgery into enthralling brief films.
Even during Communist rule, Romanian cinema still had a few original films break out. The animated 1957 "Scurtă Istorie" and the 1965 live-action film "Forest of The Hanged" won awards from the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
With glasnost on the horizon and despite most Romanian theatres not being equipped to show the classics of other European nations, 1984's "Delta Space Mission" is a real find 40 years later. This animated film has more in common with Sixties cinema in its manufacture than the post-"Star Wars" burst of Eighties "industrial vision" Science Fiction. Modeled after Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris," "Delta Space Mission" might have accurately predicted the AI we talk about so much today.
Much like the doomed crew of "Solaris" and the mischief-turns-to-menace of the HAL9000 in "2001," the supercomputer constructed in "Delta" quickly fulfills Stephen Hawking's fears of sentient machines doing anything possible to maintain those newly discovered almost-human feelings. In 3084, Earth is looking for life in other solar systems. The multi-national crew have done their homework and are trained to their peak capacities (a bit ironic when working with a computer that is capable of learning on its own.) When the reporter Alma from another constellation arrives to cover this momentous unveiling - she falls in love with it.
Surprisingly, "Delta" spins this love in a very exotic and feminine fantasy sequence. It is meant to resemble a dream as Alma swims around the computer like a Busby Berkeley number. The question the filmmakers carefully plant into your head is "Whose dream was it?" Then we learn that this so-called "superbrain" can manufacture its own robots. So, suddenly human emotions and defensive mechanisms are there for a machine to use even in cases of fuzzy logic.
Made for teenagers (based on a popular cartoon from Romanian TV,) "Delta" is a beautiful swirling melange of boldly colorful worlds. Alma as a character is drawn as the total opposite of the Delta crew. Her companion (pet, really) Tin is a robotic canine-like creature who can devour metal and still hop around like a frog (which it also resembles.) In a lengthy dialogue-free portion, this secondary character takes the lead in their most desperate time on the Dagobah-like swamp planet of Acora. Without spoiling it, "Delta" even with its unlimited scope of animation creates numerous twists and turns that suspend disbelief - always a tall order for both Science Fiction and animation.
"Delta Space Mission," while more primitively drawn than most animated fare of this period, uses it to fire your imagination. Chase sequences may play out like video games of the day, but the artistic rendering of this action is weirdly human and not far from being real (inanimate objects like antenna towers are given life and become threats.) With a design that predates CGI work, the two directors Mircea Toia and Calin Cazan drew their characters and their movements from the human actors who voiced them. In addition, this distorted sense of reality is aided by Toia's artistic creation of each paired with Cazan (an architect) placing them within patterns of logical movement.
Overall, "Delta" deserves a place in animated film history at least due to its lack of Science Fiction works. By combining elements of action, space opera, and Japanese post-Godzilla monster movies, "Delta" almost qualifies as postmodern cinema. However, it must be remembered as forward-thinking especially as the computers around us continue to consume knowledge faster than it can be obtained.
