FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST (1992) - 9/17/2024
A deeper appreciation for Disney
FernGully is one of those films that is burrowed into my brain and has lived in its recesses for a long time. It feels almost like a fever dream that this film exists, but every once and a while it will pop up like a swift acid flashback. It feels like a fever dream that collectively, an entire generation remembers but also doesn’t, and the closest thing we got to recall was when the original Avatar was released in 2009.
FernGully is not any type of nuanced film, it’s very straight forward with its environmental message, but it is at least very gorgeously drawn. However, that’s about where it ends. The film, while being only 76 minutes, tries so hard to do so many things to make it appealing or funny for kids, and that’s where it falls flat. The musical numbers are not good and completely dated to the early 90. The character development and motivations outside of Crysta are not great and confusing, and the overall sound is pretty off and doesn’t match a bunch of the animation.
This is not the first time I noticed this. A few years ago I re-watched All Dogs Go to Heaven and it had many of the same issues. While, again, the animation itself was wildly appealing, the rest of it was very off which just doesn’t bode well with me. And then re-watching all of these Disney classics from the same era, it just makes you completely appreciate what an actual art it is to execute incredible films with such precision. To have fully formulated stories that sync up with the voice work is incredible. The 3-minute musical number storylines aren’t shoved in your face, but flow naturally with the pace of the film. And while this makes sense because Disney is an old, established studio with an incredible amount of resources as compared to a small Australian company, it just says so much more about those films.
At the end of the day though, this film isn’t made for 31-year old me, it was made for four year old me, which is where it succeeded.