MotW: Fern Gully

It's interesting that Balder is coincidentally going out of his way to watch & slam every film that either I suggested or that was suggested for me. I think we've got a fail troll in our midst, men!

Funnily enough, I actually snagged a cheap copy and watched it again a few months ago out of curiosity & nostalgia's sake, since the last time I had watched it was roughly a decade ago. It was mostly how I remembered it; average in quality over all, with some good stuff and some mediocre stuff, which is still more than I can say for the average american animated Disney-knockoff at the time. There are a handfull of interesting elements that redeems Fern Gully for me:

-No musical numbers, unless you count Toxic Love. Always a plus in animation as far as I'm concerned.

-No anthropomorphic animals, although much of the animation on the wildlife still leaves a lot to be desired. But then, this is american animation, so...

-Fantasy based plot is interesting. I forgot that Hexus was actually the film's God of Destruction who originated from a volcano and the opening gives a backstory on how he nearly destroyed Fern Gully hundreds of years ago. That's some nice lore and reminds me of the sub-plots from some of the LoZ games.

-The opening hand-painted sequence is wonderful and easy my favorite-looking part of the film. I say this because I unfortunately never learned how to paint while I briefly studied art in collage (I was only taught how to work with charcaol & pen and ink), and there has always been an extreme shortage of alternative art forms used in american animation. Painting is such a wonderful medium and was an extremely important part of my childhood since many of my favorite children's books and a few of my favorite video games (such as Paper Mario) utilized it, but sadly it seems these days that traditional painting has been fazed out of mainstream entertainment by digital ink & paint. Very, very unfortunately.

-Hexus was a very interesting looking villain. I love how he has all of these different forms that are each visual metaphors of different types of pollution; i.e. his liquid form is mercury or sludge, his gas form can be seen as soot or greenhouse gas, and his penultimate form is sort of a mixture of tar and lava. Interesting stuff.

-The film's subtle visual metaphors (as mentioned above) for pollution, like the cutting the baobab tree releasing Hexus is a metaphor for carbon being released into the atmosphere as a result of the logging industry's activities. As an environmental picture I give this film and its makers credit for portraying environmental problems uniquely and subtly.


The film still has significant problems, like the shitty designs of many of the human characters, but overall I don't think Fern Gully is as bad as the bureaucratic crap Disney was putting out at the time like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and so on. I also wouldn't compare it to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, since that film was aimed at young adults and adults where as Fern Gully is aimed at children and is more of an animated adaption of a children's storybook. Nausicaa is head and heels above Fern Gully in terms of quality, but it's a different kind of film for a different audience, and I personally am glad that not every environmental animated film is like Nausicaa, since I think Nausicaa is too stimulating for most small children. I'm always willing to support smaller animation studios competing with Disney, and while Fern Gully is no masterpiece, it's still much better children's entertainment than brainless shit like We're Back a Dinosaur's Story, Rock-a-doodle, The Pebble and the Penguin, and so on. So I'll give it a 3/5.

If it has nothing to do with me then don't mention me in your rants/reviews like you did with your Rabbit-Proof Fence review. Otherwise I'll think you really are just trying to get on my nerves.

I mention people in my reviews because they're the ones who suggested it. If you follow what's going on, you'd know that cobretti has been mentioned a million times in the film threads he suggested.

At least FernGully had a way better plot than that Final Fantasy movie. People actually remember FernGully from their childhood, while FF will continue to live in obscurity.