When he was little, my brother Benjamin loved the movie FernGully. I suspect that now he'd disavow this cartoon that's the tree-hugging-est film since the animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax,
but at the time he was quite taken with the teeming wildlife, the
fish-out-of-water surfer dude, the sibilantly toxic villain and, most
especially, the wacky winged sidekick.
My strongest memory of
the movie was also Robin Williams' manic performance as Batty Koda, a
bat who has been subjected to experimentation at a lab and is
consequently deeply mistrustful of humans and has a habit of making
random outbursts. Re-watching it recently, I recalled how much more I
enjoyed his role as Genie in Aladdin, which hit theaters about half a year after FernGully.
While Batty is certainly good for a laugh, his neurotic nature grates
after a while, and his truncated rap doesn't hold up nearly as well as Friend Like Me.
Some of his cultural references are painfully dated, as is nearly every
word out of the mouth of Zak Young (Jonathan Ward), the clueless
tree-marker whom Crysta (Samantha Mathis), the headstrong
leader-in-training of the community of fairies in FernGully,
accidentally shrinks. Zak rocks out to his walkman, rhapsodizes about
"bodacious babes" and makes us suffer through the old "only fools are
positive" shtick with Batty. He's straight out of the late '80s, but the
laughable is balanced by the lovable. You can't help but like the guy
and embrace the wondrous journey he must undertake.
As
integral as Zak is to the plot - he is, after all, the representative of
humanity, and in a sense the future rests on his shoulders - the main
character is Crysta, who is youthful and spunky but possesses the latent
potential for an extra-special bond with the world around her. Wizened
mystic Magi Lune (Grace Zabriskie) mentors her as best she can, but
naive Crysta is not prepared for the horrors of the outside world and
the grim knowledge that the fanciful "human tales" painting people as
protectors of the forest are not reflected in reality.
It's obvious just from the pessimistic subtitle - "the last rainforest" - that FernGully has a message to get across: Don't clear-cut rainforests!
I love trees just about as much as J. R. R. Tolkien and John Denver
ever did, so I can't complain about the moral, though its method of
delivery is rather heavy-handed, and the simplistic animation
accompanying the retelling of legends teeters between dull and slightly
creepy. Really creepy is Hexxus, a big brown glob who propels
himself along by feeding on poisonous fumes and occasionally morphs into
a skeleton. This entity is seriously vile, and Tim Curry seems to
relish every moment of it.
On the whole, the tunes sung by
characters, which I usually much prefer to generic background songs in
these sorts of movies, aren't particularly noteworthy. Batty's solo is
annoying, while Hexxus belts out a disgusting diatribe peppered with
strange culinary comparisons like acid rain to egg chow mein and a
lizard bursts in with a jarringly random ditty about his ravenous
hunger. But I love the gorgeous, idealistic A Dream Worth Keeping, written by dream team Alan Silvestri and Jimmy Webb and performed by Sheena Easton, and Raffi's gently peppy Raining Like Magic wonderfully captures the vitality of the ecosystem. Stick around for the credits and you'll be rewarded with Some Other World, an overlooked Elton John gem.
The setting for FernGully
seems to be Australia, as we see kangaroos, platypuses and emus, but
most of the characters have American accents, with a few British accents
thrown in for good measure. I suspect director Bill Croyer and writers
Jim Cox and Diana Young were going for more of a mythical last refuge
not corresponding to any particular location. Dedicated "to our children
and our children's children," the movie aims to make a difference, one
tree at a time. For that, I can forgive a lot of retro corniness.
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