You know these kinds of movies - the ones that studios struggled to get out there since they weren't part of the Disney animated empire. Sure, these days we have the likes of Dreamworks presenting serious competition to Disney in the animated movie arena, but back in the 90's Disney pretty much dominated and thus it was a small miracle that movies like this made a mark on our collective childhood experiences the way it did.
Image via Wikipedia
The animation style was decent enough for its time, a period still covered pretty much by hand-drawn art but already was visually enhanced by touches of computer animation here and there. It gave things a nice clean look that seems to have become par for the course for many cartoons on TV today.
The story itself was strangely gripping despite the very strong environmental tones. It's not that I have anything against the environment - it's just that more often than not, such messages end up being afterthoughts that don't mesh well with the core story. Thus you end up with a sloppy piece of storytelling with a sometimes unexpected moral at the end. This was not the case for this movie and the overall result was quite delightful.
I'm not sure what they were thinking in terms of the voice talents since performances were rather mixed. They got the job done well enough, I suppose, and perhaps another factor might be some of the awkward dialog written for them at the time. The character of Batty was clearly introuduced for no real value other than comic relief and this wasn't written all that well. I'm sure Robin Williams did the best he could givne the limitations, but they definitely could have done better.
FernGully remains to be a poignant and memorable movie from our animated childhood past and will now become required viewing for anyone planning on watching James Cameron's Avatar. Just trust me on this - it'll all make sense in December when the movie comes out.
FernGully gets 3.5 tree Levelers out of a possible 5.
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