This movie is mediocre in most aspects, from animation to plot to soundtrack. But in hindsight, it was the first explicitly pro-environment animation movie in the US (except, perhaps, Secret of Nimh), and its plot of endangered habitat which must be rescued is echoed in any number of successor movies, especially in the last decade. But FernGully's message seems half-hearted, beginning with its vaguely remote setting (apparently Australia, as confirmed by the weird attempt at accents), and its fantasy landscape. My kids thought nothing of the cliched romance between the shrunken lumberjack Zak and the fairy Crysta, whose naivete is perhaps meant to echo the audience's. They reacted most strongly to the two most memorable characters in the film: the frightening evil demon Hexxus, a kind of "smoke monster" (but also sludge monster), who is a literal ghost-in-the-machine driving on the engines of destruction; and the incredibly annoying bat Batty Koda, who demonstrates that Robin Williams' manic genius was much better suited to the genie in Aladdin. Interestingly, Batty Koda was more-or-less copies wholesale in the 1997 film Anastasia as Bartok, who somehow is much less annoying!
