Review of FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) by Julie A — 23 Jan 2010

Here is another childhood favorite of mine, and still I love it now I am 24 years old. I love it's important message of protecting the rainforest and our environment, without being too 'in your face' obvious; I'm all for green too.

The film starts somewhere in the Australian rainforest, lays a fairy world known as Ferngully. One day, a fairy named Crysta while flying up on the canopy, spies a smoke cloud by "Mount Warning." And hearing from a brain-fried bat named Batty, that there are humans over there, the curious Crysta flew over see the humans. Well Batty was right, there are humans at Mount Warning, and they are logging in the forest! And we get to see the film's protagonist Zak, an ordinary teen working as a lumberjack's apprentice for a summer job. While trying to spray a fly that was buzzing around him with the spray paint to paint an 'X' on the trees, Zak had accidentally painted an X mark on an enchanted baobab tree that trapped Hexxus, the spirit of destruction and the film's main villain.

Upon being discovered, Crysta flees from Zak, who spotted her blue glow. And seeing the monstrous lumber machine cutting a tree shocked Crysta that she forgot about fleeing from Zak, who caught her. Unaware that a tree is about to fall on Zak, Crysta accidentally shrinks him down to her size; because instead of saying "fairy sight" in her spell she said "fairy size!" Then after being thrown from the massive blow from the tree's impact to the ground, Zak gets stuck on a spiderweb on the tree that's just about to go through the machine's tree shredder. Crysta tries to get him off but she can't, until Batty swoops in, grabs them both off of the spiderweb.

And now the adventure really for those two (Crysta & Zak), because once Zak sees the beauty and magic of Ferngully, he vows to save it. But it may be too late, because the logging machine had cut the enchanted tree and Hexxus is free! That's all I could tell you folks, you will have to see the film for yourself how it ends.

So anyway I really love this film, and I love the film's musical soundtrack; truly one of the best animated movies ever made with plenty of fantasy, adventure and humor.