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| ‘FernGully: The Last Rainforest’ By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer April 10, 1992 | ||
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"FernGully: The Last Rainforest" sounds as though its environmentally correct message will fall upon you like a heavy rubber tree. But "FernGully" is neither weighty nor whiny. It sings its message unobtrusively through -- and for -- the trees. And most importantly, it never forgets to be delightful, for children and their moviegoing guardians.
In a magical part of the rain forest called FernGully, elderly fairy Magi Lune (the voice of Grace Zabriskie) is trying to initiate her daughter Crysta (Samantha Mathis) in spellmaking and harnessing nature's magical forces. But attention-wandering Crysta will have to learn the hard way.
Ignoring Magi's warnings, she peeps outside her canopied little world and discovers impending disaster. A huge tree-cutting machine, known as a leveler (and operated by humans) is laying waste to everything in its path. FernGully is next. So is a tree containing Hexxus, an evil force Magi once trapped in bark. As soon as he's free, Hexxus will feed on -- and nourish -- the death and destruction.
Crysta also espies handsome young human Zak (Jonathan Ward), who's with the deforestation operation. To save him from a falling tree, she has to shrink him. But until she figures out how to restore him to human size, he'll have to tag along with her -- in the wonderful, secret world his kind is destroying.
This may sound like "The Little Mermaid" hiding under a FernGully fig leaf. There's also a little "Star Wars" in there, and a dab of "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." But this isn't so much plagiarism, as it is the synchronicity of myth. The screenplay's adapted from original fairy tales written by Australian author Diane Young for her children.
As adapted, the movie is full of scares, thrills and pleasures -- including pleasing songs by Johnny Clegg, Raffi and others, as well as voice appearances by Christian Slater and Cheech & Chong. A lizard called the Goanna (Tone-Loc) gazes hungrily at Zak and sings: "If I'm goanna eat somebody, it might as well be you." Hexxus (vampily interpreted by Tim Curry) is a nasty piece of nebulous evil. "Slime beneath, slime above," he sings, as he slurps and burps on the leveler's smoky fumes, "you'll love my toxic love."
Of all the FernGullyites, the best is a bat called Batty, thanks to off-screen man Robin Williams. Batty's radar is way off. He keeps slamming into trees. He screams hysterically at the mere sight of humans. He's also incapable of maintaining an uninterrupted thought, and keeps branching out into different personalities. "A fabulous day in the canopy, isn't it?" he says. Upon hearing a tink tink sound behind him, he offers, "Price check on prune juice, Bob."
Crysta, who could be the daughter of Warren Beatty and Betty Rubble, will have to look inside herself to find the hero. There are world-destroying forces everywhere, and it's going to take the magic powers of the web of life to thwart them. You could clutter up a kid's head with worse things than that. It's good for the young ones that they get a foreshadowed inkling about a planet facing overcrowding and under-thinking. It's also good that -- this time at least -- the good guys have a fighting chance. Too many of us older dweebs think we don't.
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