Okay so, I took a couple weeks off, I have tried to write a review for a different movie but that movie was really, really annoying to sit through. I wanted to take a bit of time off to relax and enjoy the utter boiling heat my city is dealing with currently, in that time I did an animation experiment but what is important right now is that I'm back, and my movie of choice to return with is the nineties mega preach-fest before Pocahontas. FernGully: The Last Rainforest.
The Nineties were a mixed time for animation. There was a lot of good, definitely, and you don't need me to explain it all. Disney renaissance, boon of adult animation, lessened censors, CG, Anime in the west, Internet animation, the works. However, the nineties were full of issues as well, like when people thought they could make a profit by ripping off Disney, or the shows made with excessive gross-out content, or the rise in popularity of Klasky-Csupo, whose art style I am not a fan of. I mention all of this because FernGully is, in my opinion, one of the worst animated products that came out in the nineties, and this movie came out in 1992.
The plot of the movie centers around a fairy named Crysta who lives in FernGully. One day she happens across a human deforestation project and shrinks one of the people named Zak to learn more about the Human people. However, the evil pollution being Hexxus has been freed by the people and the fairies and Zak must ban together to save the rainforest and this movie is a preachy and boring slog. Yeah, plotwise it is pretty solid, I have no questions about how things ended up going the way they did, but that is not the problem with the plot. The problem is that is spends too much time showing off the majesty and wonder of the rainforest. Yes, it does give Zak and Crysta time to develop their relationship, but less time is focused on Crysta asking Zak to feel the pain of the trees and more time is focused on them swimming through a sparkly cavern. A lot of this stuff is just filler and could have been cut to make way for other and more important things.
Take Smallfoot for an example, I did not like that movie either, but when the human was introduced tot he non-human world, the Yetis were curious about him and the movie spent some time showing the Yeti folk learn about the human. Another example would be Monsters, Inc. and its human character Boo. When Boo gets introduced to the monster world, the monster world is afraid of her, but there is a scene in the movie where Sully learns a little about Boo and grows some attachment to her. Here, we don't really get either of those scenarios, the Fairies don't really want to learn about Zak, nor are they running from him. I realize both of those movies are more recent than this, but at the same time, it is a strike against this movie as well. When something has been done better, there is less of a reason to see what is not, and when Monsters, Inc. did the concept of "Human enters non-human world" better, than why should we watch FernGully?
Character-wise this movie is weak. Zak is the nineties, he is just the nineties. There is legitimately a moment when he says "Don't have a cow". Crysta is bland, she is the typical optimistic, hopeful and curious character we've seen a bunch of times. Pips is also uninteresting, and the rest of the characters... don't really have any. Even Hexxus, the main villain, we do not get any kind of characteristic outside of "Ee-vill", and Batty is just, Robin Williams. I love Robin Williams, but this is almost the same kind of character we would eventually see in Aladdin, the comic relief with all of the references and... it was amusing at points but at the end of it all I would have just preferred to watch Aladdin.
Now we get to the animation and honestly, I wasn't impressed. Full admission here, but I watched this movie on VHS so the quality probably was not the best in the world. However, even then I watched a bunch of other movies on VHS and found them to be absolutely beautiful, Prince of Egypt, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, heck even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Same format, all looked amazing. I guess if I did see this movie on Blu-Ray I'd be more forgiving, but if I can not enjoy something on less than the best experience, than why should I bother?
The movie really should look more amazing, since the colour palette is actually pretty good. When the scene is lush and lively, the palette is green. When it is rough and dying, it's brown. When it's surreal and other-worldly it's blue-ish black and sparkly. I guess in the end the animation is okay, a couple flaws here and there but nothing that makes it suffer, though I did feel that when the movie incorporated CG (I think it was CG anyway), it looked pretty bad. I would not say it was the worst I have ever seen, but it did not sit right with me.
I guess I also have to mention the audio of this movie. Audio is tough because, backing scores are very rarely noticed by me. The good ones do not stick out all that much from the lesser ones, and only the truly amazing or truly terrible will stand out. I personally did not notice background music, I don't even remember if there was background music, unless it was the segue into a song sequence.
As for the songs, I felt they were all really short. I guess leave them wanting more and all, but most of this movie is showing off the majesty of the rainforest and you could not spare an extra minute for the songs? Or at least make them more grand and epic. A lot of people really like Tim Curry's "Toxic Love" but I felt like it could have been more. The song is four and a half minutes long, but feels like it is less. One of my favourite songs in an animated movie is Beauty and the Beast's "Be Our Guest", and while that song is shorter, clocking in at three minutes, forty-four seconds, it builds on itself, it's full of life, even with just the audio, and it ends up being the massive song. So the songs could have been bigger or at least been catchier.
This movie was kind of an agonizing slog to get through. I was not even five minutes into the film before I felt like I was being preached at, characters were uninteresting, and the movie liked to drag on and on by showing the beauty of the rainforest. I hated this movie, I never wanted to quit watching a movie so much before, it was that boring. I get that some people have a connection with this movie, and I guess at the end of the day I'd rather kids watch this movie than watch a movie like Duck Duck Goose, but that is not an especially high standard. To anyone that likes this movie, I do apologize, but I full on hated this movie, so to anyone else, I have to give it my lowest rating.
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