trying to identify SF anime film shown on British TV in 1980s or '90s [duplicate]

Question

I've been trying for years to identify a full-length SF anime film which was shown on British TV two or three times in quick succession in the late 1980s or 1990s.

I'm 90% sure it was Japanese, although the figures had normal human proportions and faces, with no cuteness or big eyes. The style, as I remember it, used very clean hard-edged lines and colours, with no scribbled lines and not much shading.

The story centred around a little boy, maybe eight years old, who had ended up stranded on his own on a planet where all the "creatures" were kind-of plants, but behaved to some extent as if they were animals. I remember a scene of him being carried across a lake by a giant water-lily which behaved like a semi-sentient boat.

Meanwhile, a large cast of characters were flying a starship to rescue this boy, but there was a lot of personal and political struggle on board. One of the characters iirc was an aristocrat with long white hair, a bit like the film version of Lucius Malfoy. One of the characters - possibly the aristocrat - turned out to be plotting against the others.

At the end, you learn that there is a time-slip involved, and that the little boy on the planet is the childhood self of one of the adult characters on the ship.

Answer 1

This has come up a couple of times here. It's the French film Les Maîtres du Temps, dubbed by the BBC as Time Masters.

The film centres on a boy, Piel, who is stranded on Perdide, a desert planet where giant killer hornets live. He awaits rescue by the space pilot Jaffar, the exiled prince Matton, his sister Belle and Jaffar's old friend Silbad who are trying to reach Perdide and save Piel before it is too late.

Jaffar's passengers, Prince Matton and his sister, Princess Belle, have been deposed from their planet; they bring with them a treasure the Prince took along to fund his restoration. Matton is not at all happy about being diverted and makes no attempt to hide his displeasure; throughout he is depicted as a lazy, arrogant and deceitful individual.

Each contacts Piel with the transceiver; when they meet Silbad, he sings Piel a song as well, as does the Princess. Whilst on Silbad's planet, they witness the metamorphosis of a water-lily like organism into dozens of empathic, sentient, primary coloured homunculi, two of whom, named Yula and Jad, stow away on Jaffar's spacecraft seeking adventure.