Ferngully: The Last Rain Forest (1992).

I think I owe an apology to John Hughes.  Either that or someone out there sure does.  It's probably the fault of someone in the long since defunct arm of of 20th Century Fox's VHS promotions department.  Whoever is responsible for the faux pas, it's thanks to their unthinking efforts that a lot of 80s an 90s kids such as myself first grew up hearing of this film as a Coming Attractions adjunct to the otherwise unblemished awesomeness that is Home Alone.  That's how I remember first learning there was ever such as Ferngully drifting around out there.  Maybe I should back up and explain a bit.  See, back in my day, we didn't have none of this here Streaming Services and DVDS.  No sir, in my day we had nothing but good old analog equipment to go on, and somehow we managed to enjoy it.  If it explains anything, then I guess its that when it comes to entertainment, human beings are more adaptable than we think we are.  As long as its in the service of a good to fairly decent show, then we're willing to overlook any and all technical limitations past a certain point.  That's how it was for us in the X and Y generations, anyway.  

When I was still a kid it meant that sometimes anything you learned about the latest movie releases came from just two sources.  The primary one was the commercials on the family television set.  The second was the preview segments that most videotape cassettes came with from roughly the mid-80s to around 1997.  Those were the glory years of VHS, and while it was smooth sailing for the most, part, sometimes watching those old analog Coming Attraction segments could make for either some interesting to jarring tonal contrasts or combinations.  The way I first learned about the existence of Ferngully is a good case in point.

I never learned about this now somewhat notorious piece of kid's fare from a movie theater.  Instead, as I've hinted above, the way it all came about was through a simple sequence of events.  John Hughes and Christopher Columbus created Home Alone in 1990, and it became an instant pop culture touchstone.  My Mom and Dad came to me raving about it.  I was about Kevin's age back then, so at least I have a sort of excuse (however poor) for having missed out on its initial theatrical impact (okay, I'm a complete idiot, I get it!).  Then the film's first home media release comes in the form of a VHS package I'm sure most of us remember from our childhoods.  I pop the cassette into the VCR (ask your parents), the film starts, I come to understand just what everyone is talking about, and come away with a richer sense of understanding from the experience.  Just before the film began, however, I was treated to a series of promos courtesy of Fox Video.  One of them was a very ironic promo from American Airlines, which declared that they were "proud to be a partner in the video release of Home Alone."  The commercial goes on to say that "American salutes the many families that have made American Airlines something special in the air."  I guess the company must have been not too smart then as now, because if there's one thing Hughes' film doesn't do, its paint a flattering portrait of the airport industry.  You could make a whole nightmare comedy of errors scenario about the McCallisters just trying to get on the plane. 

The other commercial is a second sponsor, Pepsi Cola.  It's dated in many ways, and even teaches a bad lesson to kids if you stop and think about it.  It showcases a pair of friends going on about how you shouldn't let others judge you based on the way you dress or carry yourself, much less what kind of soft drink you enjoy.  Then a girl comes up and asks one of the kids, "You got a Pepsi for me?"  The entire point is not so much thwarted as bulldozed over and forgotten about as one of the kids who was going on about being yourself becomes a total sellout for The Pepsi Generation.  All his friend can do is observe and say, "Who knew?"  Yeah, well I for one know there is a whole world of wrong going on in a commercial which tries to peddle its product under the banner of "Just Be Yourself" in a way which turns a good idea into the worst sort of lie.  There's a hell of a cautionary tale in all of that somewhere.  However, it's the third commercial I'm here to talk about.  It also comes first in chronological order, and I think my 8 year old self knew that something was up with what I was seeing; I just didn't have the vocabulary or conceptual base of knowledge necessary to tell what seemed so strange to me back then

With the passage of time, what makes this slate of commercials so jarring to a modern audience is a combination of just how tone deaf they all are to the content and point of the movie they were meant to lead into, and that's where part of the cognitive dissonance stems from.  I mean two of them are trying to tout their products with a straight face right before a film which spends most of its runtime dismantling the cheap sloganeering of its time period.  So I guess there's an accidental sense of the joke being on the sponsors, and they don't even know it.  What made the Ferngully commercial stand out to me even back then seems to have been the nascent knowledge that I was looking at two stories that didn't have any reason to be lumped together.  One of them is just a simple animated film with strong Disney or Don Bluth overtones in its DNA.  The film its leading into, by contrast, proves to be sophisticated enough to qualify as perhaps the last great Brat Pack film in John Hughes' career.  While it's true the main protagonist is a pre-teen, it's also very clear that Kevin spends the majority of the film's runtime grappling with the same set of ideas that the Breakfast Club struggles with in their own story.  It's just that now its all being seen through the eyes of a little kid.  What's interesting about his iteration of this same setup is that he manages to not let it all drag him down to the same kind of low point like Bender and his newfound friends have to put up with,  Instead, he's more prepared by the end.  You get the sense that this kid will grow up more ready to face the challenges of adulthood.

It's pretty heavy stuff for a Holiday flick, yet it's the primary reason people still remember Home Alone fondly after all these years.  It's because it speaks to universal struggles that most of us have to deal with in coming of age, and realizing that maybe there's no such thing as a true grown up, and that we have to determine how be our truly authentic selves in a way that doesn't get bought and sold by the rat race of life.  Before all that, though, here's a brief clip of Robin Williams as a crazy fruit bat in an unknown Don Bluth knock-off!  So yeah, the cognitive dissonance was strong with this one.  Having the Ferngully commercial come on just before the movie started was enough to create this strange dichotomy in my mind.  On the one hand, it made the film I was watching out to be no different than your standard Mouse House oriented film.  On the other hand, it's clear Hughes was dealing with far more mature themes than any of the people in Fox's marketing division were aware of.  In practical terms, it means I was allowed to watch a disconnect between the studio advertisers and the artists take place in a manner that's kind of informative in a strange way.  It showcases how some people can misread a story as opposed to the more knowing intelligence of the audience.  On a further level, the whole experience was just curious enough to get me thinking about what kind of film Ferngully was in its own right.  I got a chance to answer that question for myself later on in elementary school.

It was during my pre-teen school days that I first got a chance to see the film on its own terms.  My schoolteachers would sometimes trot out a TV hooked up to a VCR to show their young charges (of which I used to be one) during any slow periods when there was a gap in their daily curriculum.  It's how I got a chance to see the movie presented in its own terms.  At the time, I remember not minding it all that much, yet it was difficult to tell just what (if any) sort of an impact it left on me.  I know it must have reminded me a bit of the kind of film's Bluth was famous for.  There were moments when it felt like it was at least trying to reach for that same vibe.  And to be fair, it kept me interested.  However I don't recall it making all that big of an impact on me.  Instead, from what I can remember, the final takeaway is probably best described as one of those middle of the road experiences.  It wasn't great, yet I suppose I was in a generous enough frame of mind to not call it bad.  And to be fair, some bits and pieces of it would emerge on occasion from my memory.  It never happened often; not to the extent of An American Tail, for instance.  That's a movie I still recall watching as child with jaw agape in an awestruck frame of mind that existed somewhere between terror and wonder.  It remains perhaps the key shaping event of my filmgoing life.  I don't recall Ferngully giving me anywhere near the same vibes.  And yet it managed to stick around in my mind, so I decided to go back and see why that is.

The Story.     

One of the first things this film hits you with is it's attempt at a complex background of lore building.  It starts by detailing a time when humans and the elemental spirits of the forest lived in harmony together.  Like most legends, this one takes place in a bygone golden age that is soon destined to come to an end.  The way this version of Paradise Lost works out is with the emergence of an evil spirit named Hexxus (Tim Curry).  Legends say he was a fire demon who was born out of the eruption of a volcano, and somehow he came out...wrong.  Whatever his true origins may be, Hexxus soon wasted no time in laying waste to the once fertile land of Ferngully, driving the humans to what many believe to be their extinction, and planning much the same fate for the wood sprites who called Ferngully their home.  It was either through sheer will power, or else just plain good fortune that the inhabitants of the forest were able to turn the tide against their adversary, imprisoning Hexxus within the prison of a boab tree.

Ever since that time, the elements of Ferngully have had a sworn duty to protect the magic of their forest home, and make sure that such threats never happen again.  At least that's the story that Crysta (Samantha Mathis) was brought up on by her mentor/guardian Magi (Grace Zabriskie), the leader of her people.  To hear Magi tell it, wood sprites like Crysta are the descendants of those brave souls of the woods who fought back against the darkening blight that once infected the land.  Magi also claims she was there to see it all happen, and participated in bringing about Hexxus's downfall.  However, most of the wood sprites, including Crysta's annoying yet well-meaning friend Pips (Christian Slater) believe that these are nothing more than just a bunch of old wives tales.  Something the tribe's leading elder likes to spin to put the fear into her young charges.  Crysta herself isn't all that much inclined to pay it any mind.  She's preoccupied with an inner restlessness to explore whatever lies beyond the boundaries of their woodland home.  It's true you can see the mouth of an old volcano way off in the distance, yet there's a perfectly logical explanation for things like that.  Crysta's real fondest wish is to be the first of her people to discover whatever may lie beyond the forest.  One day, she's given just that opportunity.

It starts when Crysta catches sight of a plume of smoke emerging from somewhere near the borders of Ferngully.  Magi dismisses it as nothing to worry about, yet its sparks just the right sort of curiosity in Crysta to make her take flight and set off to find the source of the darkness in the sky.  It's in doing so that she begins to find a number of troubling answers to a lot of the questions that have filled her mind from a young age.  The first comes in the form of a peculiar and somewhat disturbed fruit bat named Koda (Robin Williams).  After she rescues him from danger, Batty tells Crysta tales of being experimented on by a group of hulking giants who cut up his brain, yet somehow left him alive, and yet its clear his mind has been forever altered by the tortures inflicted on him.  According to Batty, this race of malicious titans are known as humans.  This news is hard for Crysta to believe, even as it horrifies her.  There's no way such things can be, after all.  Koda must have been mistaken.  Besides, everyone knows humans no longer exist.  As she makes her way closer to the sight of the black smoke, however, Crysta begins to learn that their might more than just a kernel of truth in the old legends she was told as a child.  For one thing, she fulfills her lifelong dream by reaching the end of the forest.

As the first of her tribe to emerge from the other side, the sight that greets her is a disturbing one.  It's the remnants of trees that have been lobbed off, almost to their very bases, leaving nothing but fresh cut stumps behind.  Traveling a bit further on, Crysta gets the third biggest shock in her life.  It seems that not only are the hulking titans Batty spoke about real, it seems that these are the very same humans that Magi always spoke about.  Soon Crysta has made the acquaintance of one of these so-called humans, named Zak (Jonathan Ward), and as she learns more about what he and his fellow inhabitants are doing in the vicinity of her home, she begins to understand that maybe the old stories about Hexxus were true, and that perhaps the fire demon may be back for revenge, and an old threat has returned to Ferngully.

Conclusion: A Well Meant Failure. 

If I had to sum this movie up in just a few short phrases, then the list would include terms like: misguided; misfired; poorly thought out; unable to make up its mind; not as clear a focus as it could have; a bit too all over the place; derivative.  There's one other phrase that sums this picture up, yet I'll circle back to it near the end.  Right now it's best to focus on why this film isn't as good as could be.  From what I can tell, the issues with this film boil down to three interrelated problems.  The first problem is with the story.  The second is how the film chooses to tackle its themes.  The last problem is the way it handles its characters.  The trouble with the story as a whole is that it there's too much going on for the film's own good.  It seems as if the screenwriters just threw too many ingredients into a blender and then realized too late that they didn't have enough of a budget in place that would have allowed them to explore al these details with the kind of depth they'd probably need in order to get viewers invested in them.  It almost makes me wonder if this would have worked better as a Saturday Morning Cartoon.  At least that's the kind of format which would give the writers a template with room enough to explore the underlying concepts of the story and its word at a leisurely, episodic pace.

Perhaps that means the real first mistake was thinking they could cram so much lore into the space of a 90s era feature film for kids.  As things stand, the problem with the secondary world conjured up director Bill Kroyer and writers Diana Young and Jim Cox is that it's allowed to rest on a series of visuals that hint at a larger fantastical universe hidden amongst the natural world, yet the plot never takes it time to introduce and world-build on these elements.  This has the negative effect of making the setting and its characters come off as flat and one-dimensional, while also giving the sense of things being a bit too over-crowded for any one element to draw the viewer's attention in any meaningful way.  Those are also the last few phrases that best sum up this whole affair.  There's the uncomfortable sense that everything is a rush job, of sorts.  Like the script was at the mercy of whatever the filmmakers could afford in terms of a budget.  This creates an inevitable sense of everything being a quick fix done in haste, where a proper narrative takes however much time is necessary to bring the story to life.

That can be a tall order when you're working for a series of small indie animation companies who have to pool their resources together if they ever want to even have a budget that would allow the picture to move forward.  It's easy to see how those sort of constraints can cause the script to suffer as a natural enough result.  The trouble is that it's also the worst sort of artistic poison for any project that feels like it needs more time and effort put into its story.  It's also possible that this same issue is what causes the film not just to feel rushed and unfinished.  It might even account for the fact that the way the movie tackles its own themes feels clunky and mismanaged.  There's a key scene near the beginning which sort of telegraphs the unfocused and confused way the film will tackle its environmental message.  It starts when Samantha Mathis's main character is given a lesson in how the logic of her secondary world works.  It's also the point at which the nature the story becomes problematic from the standpoint of any viable conservationism.  It starts when the protagonist admits she's never seen smoke before, much less even heard of the concept (which is strange in itself, because forest fires should be a common enough occurrence in her environment, even without the interference of human agency).  To this, she's told:

"There are many things in our world which you don't yet know about, Crysta.  There are worlds within worlds, Crysta.  Everything in our world is connected by the delicate strands of the web of life.  Which is balanced between forces of destruction, and the magic forces of creation".  I've singled out this whole short monologue as the point where the trouble starts, because it effectively signals to the audience that the narrative itself isn't going to be in the best possible hands from here on in.  It's the point at which the movie starts to lay out its main themes of the necessity of the conservation of nature, and it's also the moment where the film can either make or break itself.  The key thing to realize is that whatever it's ultimate failures as a story, it's vital message is the correct one.  There remains a crucial need to make sure we not just conserve, but also husband and nurture all the essential natural resources necessary to maintain the sort of optimum balance that will allow for the healthy continuance of life, both human and animal.  That, in itself, will always remain a worthy goal.  It's clear this is the basic idea the film spends its whole runtime chasing after.  The problem is it does so in such a clumsy, ill-fitted way, that it's almost like it can't help stumbling over its own good intentions.  I'd argue that one of the key missteps is either the introduction of fantasy elements into the proceedings, or else a poor handling of those tropes.

The biggest misstep from my perspective is the way Cox and Young try to suggest that nature itself is a kind of magic.  The problem with this kind of approach is that it handily sidesteps the actual organic processes that have to be safeguarded in order for nature to thrive on its own.  Survival methods such as natural selection, photosynthesis, the role played by both water and sunlight, are all given this strange short-shrift which just serves to trivialize a serious topic.  Now, to be fair, it may be that the screenwriters are being true to their own beliefs, if we assume that they view nature through a form of New Age spiritualism.  Well, even if that's the case, it still leaves the major issue unaddressed.  Nature is capable of taking care of itself and its own affairs, provided it has a level playing field to work with.  The real issue is mankind's belief that it can control all of nature; that we can harness its powers for our own purposes without any scrap of consequences.  This viewpoint has been demonstrated as both false and shortsighted time and again.  Indeed, perhaps the most fitting irony seems to be that any successful attempt at a full control of natural resources would mean man's total conquest by nature itself.  The human being is a natural product, just like other animal and plant life.  As such, there's no way this Microcosm can ever try and go against the Macrocosm that birthed it with fatal consequences to itself.

That is the main idea that Ferngully keeps trying to work its way toward.  It's main issue is that it can't do that in any kind of successful way.  It's clear that Young and her collaborators wanted to tell a Fantasy story with a important environmental message, and yet neither she, nor anyone else was ever able to make all the elements gel together in a way that seemed fitting and, for lack of a better word, natural.  Even if we leave the bungled handling of the film's themes out of the equation, you're still left with a setup and a pair of protagonists that tend to come off as a bit too by the numbers for the story's own good.  The story at its core is almost a cliche variation of the sort of animated features being churned out at the time.  You've got the wide-eyed innocent who is curious about the rest of the world.  Then there's her eventual love interest who is a street smart wise guy.  Robin Williams even supplies the film's comic relief in a way that's in keeping with notion established in previous media before Ferngully's debut in theaters.  It all telegraphs Young and her collaborators as falling into what seems to be a common trap in a lot of subpar Hollywood screenwriting.  In trying to tell their story, they make the mistake on believing that just treating what worked before as a template is all the film needs.

The trouble is that's never been how storytelling works, nor is it what made any of the other films that Ferngully might drawing from a success in the first place.  The Hero's Journey isn't a catch-all solution to any of the writer's dilemmas.  For one thing, copying the plot beats of the original Star Wars is no guarantee that you'll the same payoff that Lucas achieved back in 1977.  This was proven when Disney made just that mistake with their own attempts at aping what the company mistook for the winning formula, and yet the final result was not even an exercise in nostalgia, so much as style over substance.  The filmmakers misidentified what makes a movie like that work in the first place, and the same thing appears to be happening here with Young and Kroyer's film.  The characters of Zak and Crysta are being put through their paces in a paint-by-numbers scheme, and there's not much in the way of any further intelligent thought or Inspiration necessary that would make them and their situations come to full Imaginative life.  It shouldn't be all that surprising then if the final result is that the cast and plot always maintains this sort of flat, one-dimensional, just-going-through-the-motions quality throughout it all.

The curious thing is how there are, not so much two exceptions to these results, so much as there are a handful of moments when two characters in the film's cast throw off a few sparks of creativity in passing.  Perhaps its not too surprising to learn that these moments come from the efforts of Robin Williams and Tim Curry.  Let's start with Peter Pan's role in all this.  The trick with Robin Williams is that he was always capable of being a fine actor, you just needed to locate that delicate balance between a well written script, and Rob's natural skills as perhaps the best adlib, improv comedian in history.  If you could land at somewhere near that happy medium, then the results could sometimes turn to gold, as in the cases of Good Morning, Vietnam, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Hook.  Each of those films works because Williams and the screenwriters managed to arrive at just the right meeting of minds, where the writing of the script was able to match the actor's talents.  You can sense the same process wanting to come together and gel here, with Ferngully.  The way Batty's character comes off in the finished film is best described as a constant tonal conflict between shifting modes of behavior and the way this strikes the viewer.  One minute he can be just plain annoying with his manic gestures and character tics.  Just when think you're ready to get tired of him, though, Williams trademark skills as a humorist shine through, and he manages to win you back.  This is the constant over-arching pattern this character goes through.

One moment you just wish someone had the smart idea to not give Williams a Rap Battle number to sing, and then during that same musical interlude, they'll cut away to a brief flash of backstory for the character, and we realize that Batty is a victim of vivisection and animal experimentation.  It doesn't entirely alleviate the uphill battle he has to face in terms of the quality of the writing vs. Williams desire to adlib, yet it does work well enough as a character note to kind of help of us sympathize with him just enough to the point where we don't mind too much if he sticks around.  Also, on the plus side, I'll swear there are moments when he's onscreen where it sounds for al the world as if Williams kinda knew he'd been given a subpar script to work with, and was either looking for ways to liven things up, or else he just couldn't help making fun of it all by throwing the occasional veiled barb out at elements of the plot or the way the characters are written.  Take for instance a quiet conversation sequence where Zak and Crysta are getting to know one another, and Batty has been allowed to linger around in the background, so that he overhears the conversation.  At a certain point, the following exchange takes place:

Zak: "You know, bodacious, bad, tubular...?"

Williams: "Awesome use of the language, dude."

Williams delivers that line with just the right amount of sarcasm and snark that I can't help thinking this was an adlib he was basically allowed to get away with, and one very possible reason why they let him get away with what amounts to trash talking the piece is because they kinda knew he had a point.  It's one of those moments that jumps out at you looking back on this film as an adult.  It's instants like these, along with a handful of other moments when Williams skills as a humorist shine through what is otherwise a piece of mediocre material that sort of helps you see how a better version of this story could have gone.  Before we get there, however, we still need to talk about the final good ingredient this picture has going for it.  This aspect of the feature can be summed up in just two words: Tim Curry.  It's no secret that the minute his voice slithers its way into the movie that things begin to pick up a considerable notch.  That's because Curry is able to utilize his own skills as an actor to inject some much needed life what is an otherwise cookie-cutter affair.  His performance as the villain Hexxus is often cited even by those who don't like Ferngully as a genuine highlight, with some even counting it as perhaps a minor gem in the actor's filmography.  Curry's scenes in the film are also something of a great missed opportunity.  Because the film utilizes so little of him, it wastes a talented performance.

The same problem applies to Robin Williams as well, and yet together, he and Curry are often cited as the main reasons to even bother with this film.  One of the benefits of judgement calls like this is that they do allow you to understand how a better version of this film might have gone.  It would focus on the two main draws the film has going for it (i.e. the presence of Robin Williams and Tim Curry) and playing to their main strengths in service of a viable narrative.  The way that might work could go as follows.  For one thing, while you might not have to ditch the Fantasy element entirely, it's best to remove the the whole wood sprite/pixie angle.  That means no Crysta, no Pips, and no Zak.  Instead, you'd have to see how possible it is to make Batty the main character, and do so in a way that plays up Williams strength as both an actor and Improv comic.  It would involve a certain amount of toning the character down so that he's not there just for comic relief.  It would still be necessary for him to have his manic episodes here and there, yet they would be more measured and involving.  When he isn't having such moments is when he can be snarky, yet there should also be this bitter, traumatic edge to it.  You'd need to make clear that being a victim of human vivisection means there's a hard earned strand of paranoia in Batty's mind that acts as one of the prime motivators of this alternate film's entire plot.

The story itself would involve Batty escaping his captors, then flying into the Mount Warning rainforest, only to find himself being stalked by Tim Curry's Hexxus.  The rest of the film would amount to an extended chase sequence, as Batty keeps trying to run away from Hexxus, yet the tormenting fire spirit keeps hot on the bat's trail.  Here is where it would be possible to blur the lines by calling into question whether or not Hexxus is a genuine threat, or else a fevered figment of Batty's unstable mindset.  And yes, it means Tim Curry is once more playing a character who is meant to represent a summation of the main character's fears.  How original.  It's still better than what he's given to work with in the finished film we've got on our hands, and like I say, at least it play's to the actor's strengths.  Things would come to a head when Batty discovers a logging company encroaching into what he's come to think of as his newfound home, and in a fit of desperate anger decides to launch a careful, covert assault against the machines trying to tear down the forest.  He will be spurred on by this thanks to a combination of desire to hold onto something of a natural life for himself, combined with the realization this is the source of where Hexxus's power comes from.  It would result in the clever little bat being successful, while still leaving room for either a natural or Supernatural plot interpretation.

This at least would have been an interesting scenario by itself.  As things stand, what we're left with is a film with good intentions that somehow manages to get in its own way.  The story as we have it is bland and generic, the characters are stock performances with little in the way of individuality to them, and the best actors in the cast are utilized in all the wrong ways.  It's an early example of a film having a lofty, even praiseworthy goal, and then somehow the filmmakers can't seem to get out of their own way, and thus trip their own efforts up, leaving both themselves and audiences disappointed.  In the end, both Diane Young and Bill Kroyer are the ones who lose out the most.  I wish I could have something positive to say about Ferngully, yet I'm afraid the final results are a bit of an abject failure all around.