FernGully: The Last Rainforest - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

FernGully: The Last Rainforest



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
It’s always amazing how viewing a film from your childhood can result with such differing experiences when seen through the eyes of someone decades apart. I remember Ferngully: The Last Rainforest being one of the staples of my childhood, along with The Land Before Time, Winnie the Pooh and a ton of Don Bluth animated films. Some of them have really stood the test of time and are entertaining even 20 years later, while others haven’t aged so well. I honestly haven’t seen Ferngully since I was an 18 year old babysitting my younger siblings (yes, yes, that’s almost 25 years ago), so I went into this review completely blind except for the remembrances of a youthful boy.

Over the last 50 years there has always been an environmentally/socially conscious bent to film making. In the 1970s we made movies warning of acid rain. In the 80s we were all about saving the whales, and by the 1990s we had shifted onto saving the rain forests of South America. I don’t remember Ferngully being super environmental from 22+ years ago, but looking back it’s pretty obvious that the movie was an attempt to educated (or indoctrinate depending on your point of view) the younger generation on the problems we were facing from stripping the rain forests of trees. In fact, I’d hardly even call it a movie at all, and more of a parable as it whacks you over the head with that message PRETTY heavily.

The film starts out with a narration by the aged fairy Magi (Grace Zabriskie) telling her young ward Crysta (Samantha Mathis) about how the evil being of chaos Hexxus (Tim Curry) was defeated many many years ago and sealed within a tree, thus saving the land of Ferngully. Crysta isn’t exactly paying that much attention though, as she’s more interested in having fun and exploring Ferngully with her friend Pips (Christian Slater). However, when she strays to the very edge of the forest, Crysta experiences her first run in with an actual human. There she finds a young man named Zak (Jonathan Ward) is working as a logger, marking trees for the excavator to chop down.

Saving Zak from a falling tree, Crysta shrinks the young man down to her size, and introduces him to the fairy world, completely unaware that Zak is partially responsible for the trees being cut down. Unfortunately that’s not the only problem, as the excavator chops down the tree that holds the spirit of Hexxus, unleashing the monster upon the world once again. Realizing just how powerful the machine is, Hexxus takes command of the vehicle and heads it straight for Ferngully, intent on finishing his reign of destruction that he started years before.

Fern Gully (e.g., Avatar for kids) hasn’t aged nearly as well as I would have hoped. It’s silly, got the classic animated film tropes (with Robin Williams doing his best to add levity to the movie as Batty), but the heavy handed messaging really feels dated and in your face now that I’m seeing it from an adult’s point of view. I totally get the idea of combating deforestation, but Ferngully was more of a teaching aid rather than an actual movie. It goes through the movements well enough, and ends about how you would expect, but at the end of the day it really feels like a vehicle for the message rather than an honest attempt to make an entertaining movie first and foremost.




Rating:

Rated G for General Audiences




Video:

Ferngully was originally released on Blu-ray 10 years ago from 20th Century Fox (a release I never ended up seeing) that used a very aged and decrepit master, but Shout Factory has supposedly access to a “new 4K scan and restoration of the original film elements” according to the press release. The new 4K restoration looks decent enough, but you can tell there was definitely a lot of print damage and debris that never got taken care of (or couldn’t). Speckles and flecks are present for most of the movie, and sometimes certain scenes can be overly soft. However, the good side of this coin is that the colors are warm and vibrant (the bright greens and oranges of the forest are amazing), and there is a nice layer of organic film grain over the entire image. End result is what is most likely an improvement over the old release, but is still not going to blow your socks off due to age and limitations of the source animation.









Audio:

Featuring the old 5.1 DTS-HD MA mix (and a 2.0 downmix in DTS-HD MA), the audio mix is surprisingly agile and pleasing. It IS a bit forward heavy, with most of the heavy lifting taking place in those front 3 channels, but there are quite a few sequences where the surrounds light up and the bass kicks in. The chase through the forest on Batty’s back is quite encompassing, and the roar and heft of Hexxus and his excavator add quite a bit of low end punch. All in all, it’s an impressive mix for a cheap low budget 1990s children’s flick.












Extras:

• Introduction
• Audio Commentary with Director Bill Kroyer, Art director Ralph Egglesten, and art director Susan Kroyer
• Seed of the Story: Script to Screen Comparison
• From Paper To Tree
• Toxic Love
• Original Featurette
• If I'm going to Eat Someboyd (It Might as Well be You) - Music Video
• Trailers

Final Score: ​

There’s not a whole ton TO Ferngully outside of simple discovery and the environmental message, but it’s a moderately entertaining children’s flick that was seminal for the time. Back then pioneered the start of CGI, using over 40,000 frames of digital animation back when it was thought to be a near impossibility (the rest was good old fashioned hand drawn cel animation), and it was lauded for it’s message. The old Blu-ray was supposedly not the greatest, though the new master from Shout Factory isn’t SUPER hot either (definitely aged and has some debris issues). Fans of the movie will love the new special features and seeing their childhood classic for the very first time, but newer audiences may find it a bit cliched.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Time Curry, Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Jonathan Ward, Robin Williams, Grace Zabriskie
Directed by: Bill Krover
Written by: Jim Cox, Diana Young
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DTS-HD MA 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Shout Factory
Rated: G
Runtime: 76 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: August 23rd, 2022

Recommendation: Nostalgic rental