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Ferngully: The Last Rainforest Movie Review

Ferngully: The Last Rainforest is a 1992 animated musical fantasy film directed by Bill Kroyer and made by 20^th Century Fox. It’s a solid enough movie, but it should have been better.

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“Gravity works“

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The magical inhabitants of a rainforest fight to save their home, which is threatened by logging and a polluting force of destruction called Hexxus. There is a lot of talk these days that this movie in particular influenced James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’, but in actuality ‘Pocahontas’ is also similar and many other environmentally conscious movies, so all of them were taking things from each other in unison.

My main issue with the movie is that it simply isn’t sophisticated enough to be a great teaching lesson for children, maybe just for small kids it would suffice but otherwise definitely not. Firstly, I loved Tim Curry’s voice work on Hexxus, the main baddie of the movie. His voice was, in fact, so scary that he had to tone it down for the final product, but the movie is still pretty creepy in the moments where the villain is on-screen and Curry should be praised for being such a menacing addition to an otherwise happy-go-lucky flick.

But within this character lies the central problem and that is the diluting of the environmental message. The movie is all about the importance of protecting the rainforest, but the supernatural entity took away from the necessity of portraying these loggers as bad people who should be stopped. As a result, the message becomes muddled and weak.

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And the rainforest doesn’t look as realistic as it should have looked. Supposedly, the movie’s set in an Australian rainforest, but they only included a couple of animals from said forests, leaving an impression that it isn’t quite aware of its surroundings. The voice cast being entirely American did not help matters either.

But the animation done on Ferngully is still amazing. I have to praise the movie for looking as gorgeous as it does. The CGI that was done was minor, but it made an impact. The hand-drawn aesthetic was just beautiful to look at. The forest felt alive with the trees, mushrooms and various creatures all being wonderfully colorful and very well designed. By far the best reason to see the movie is its visuals.

The voice acting is also pretty good. This was actually the first animated movie role for Robin Williams, even before Genie in ‘Aladdin’. And he did a great job playing Batty Koda, but this bat character was a bit too annoying for my taste and I really disliked his rap number. Crysta and Zak are your regular animated protagonists with not that memorable personalities, but their relationship was well realized overall. Other animals are just comic reliefs, though some of them are pretty endearing.

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Ferngully: The Last Rainforest is also a musical and I simply did not care for most of its numbers. The soundtrack here skewed heavily toward hip-hop, which I personally am not a fan of. Furthermore, it distinctly set the movie in the nineties, making it somewhat dated as a result. But those who like this kind of music should find the soundtrack solid. If I’m Gonna Eat Somebody is actually one of the highlights as this very solid villain song. A Dream Worth Keeping is easily the best song as it’s very beautifully sung and moving.