Video: In Jakob Schmidt’s Planemah, an impatient king becomes obsessed with a philosophical query that drives him beyond the edge of madness — and into a place of extreme intergalactic turmoil.
In an interview with Directors Notes, Schmidt explained his inspiration for the story, and the film’s sorta-portmanteau of a title:
When I wrote the script for Planemah I was intrigued by the idea of a protagonist who is seeking for ‘something’ until he figures out that the answer of his question is inside of himself. This basic idea was finally combined with the story of a character who desperately chases the secrets of his own existence and the universe. The challenge was to combine all these complex parts into a short story. At that point I decided to choose the easy structured narrative form of a fairytale and tried to clash it with unexpected elements such as the music and the design of the characters and the worlds. With the film title Planemah my aim was to create a strange and maverick word fitting the context of the story — ‘Planemah’ is a word construction of ‘Planet nightmare’.
Extra points for that groovy rock ‘n’ roll end-credits jam, too.