Bill Kroyer’s animated plea for the rainforest is prettier than it is clever. The glade glows, Tim Curry’s smog-demon has the best tune, and Robin Williams talks faster than the script can think; the heroes and the sermon are duller than both.
Bill Kroyer’s film runs 76 minutes and wants every one of them to send a child home worried about trees. FernGully is a rainforest glade of fairies who believe humans died out long ago; a logging crew arrives with a yellow machine called the Leveler and proves them wrong. That is the whole of Jim Cox’s screenplay, and it is enough. The result is decent family fantasy with a lovely painted look and a villain worth the ticket on his own, and it goes slack every time it stops to say what it is for.
The glade earns the affection. The backgrounds are done in soft pinks, violets and mossy greens, with light falling through the canopy in visible shafts, and the fairies are drawn small enough that a fern frond is a staircase and a beetle is transport. Crysta’s first lesson, coaxing a seed into a sprout with her hands, is quiet and charming. Against all this the Leveler is built to be the ugliest object on screen: a squat yellow box on tracks with a mouth of blades at the front and chimneys pumping black smoke from the back. When it first pushes into frame the colour drains out of the picture around it.
Then the smoke gets a voice. Hexxus, sealed inside a tree long ago, pours out of the Leveler’s exhaust as a black oil that gathers into shoulders and a grin, and Tim Curry sings to it about how much he loves sludge and soot and the taste of a chemical spill. We sat up. It is the only sequence in which the animation, the writing and the performer are all reaching for the same thing, and Curry plays it as a seduction rather than a threat, low and amused and in no hurry. The film is arguing that pollution is horrible and has made pollution the most attractive thing in it. We spent the rest of the running time waiting for the oil man to come back, and we suspect most children do the same.
Robin Williams plays Batty Koda, a fruit bat with an electrode still bolted to his skull who has escaped a laboratory and cannot stop talking. He hops between announcers, game show hosts and a nervous patient inside a single sentence, and it is plainly a rehearsal for the Genie he voiced in Aladdin, also from 1992. About a third of it lands. Gillian L. Hutshing cuts him into every gap in a scene so that he never seems to pause, which suits the character and tires the film. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, as the tree spirits Stump and Root, get two good exchanges, and Tone Loc’s Goanna delivers a growled number about the pleasure of eating a shrunken human that is nearly as good as Curry’s.
The trouble is the pair we are meant to care about. Samantha Mathis gives Crysta warmth, but Cox has written her as curiosity and nothing else, and Jonathan Ward’s Zak, the young logger she shrinks to her size, arrives with headphones, a spray can and a grin and never acquires a fourth thing. Their attachment is a few looks and a dance. Around them the script keeps stopping for instruction: Grace Zabriskie’s Magi Lune explains the balance of the forest, Crysta explains it again to Zak, and Zak repeats it aloud so we cannot miss it. By the third lecture we had stopped listening. Alan Silvestri’s score does its job, flutes and shimmer for the glade and brass for the machine, but the songs carry the film and the score fills in between them.
Set beside the Disney films of the same years this is a smaller thing, and it moves like one. The backgrounds are richer than the characters standing in front of them; the fairies drift in a way that feels like economy rather than flight, and their faces settle into two or three expressions. As a picture book about the rainforest it is better than most, because it lets the villain be exciting and the forest be beautiful before anyone says the word ecosystem.
It carries a U and deserves it, though Hexxus may cost a small child a night’s sleep, which is a compliment to Hexxus. Under-eights will take the message and the beetles and be content. Adults should stay for Curry, forgive Williams, and be glad the thing is done in 76 minutes.
