Les Merveilleuses aventures de Crysta

Let me first start by saying that I am a huge fan of the first movie, The Last Rainforest: with its intriguing animation, original beautiful storyline with the strong themes of environmentalism and deforestation. The characters were splendid and fresh, and the villain Hexuss, played by Tim Curry, absolutely terrified me as a child.

So watching this movie felt like someone was attempting to butcher it beyond recognition.

The first of the many things I saw wrong with this film is the animation. It's cheap, flat and uninteresting. There is no plot, so to speak of. A few hunters kidnap baby animals (who are not even that cute or worth feeling too sorry for) and the residents of Ferngully have to go and rescue them.

All the actors from the original film have been replaced by less professional voice actors. The characters are simply cardboard cut outs of the original. Crysta seems to have completely forgotten about Zak, their relationship being the core center of the first film, and Pips is complaining about nothing.

But the worst change is Batty. Voiced by Robin Williams in the first, the newly voiced Batty in this sequel is just loud and abrasive. For some unknown reason, his head antenna is missing, he has hands instead claws and automatically overcomes his fear of humans to cheer the animals up when they are locked away. And the villains are just the most awful creations ever. They are the repeated stereotypical human hunters who view animals as nothing more than object to be killed and sold over for money, with horribly bad dialogue and silly laughs.

Avoid at all costs.

It's been more than a decade since this movie was made, but for the 90s kids who are considering watching Ferngully 2, to be honest... don't expect too much. I read previous reviews before I watched it and they did say that Ferngully 2 was no where near as good as the first one. But being unbiased as most movie reviews are, I watched it for myself and this was my opinion about it.

Ferngully 1 was about all the elements of magic, story telling, eerieness and an amazing message & lesson. It was also very funny at times and very touching. With the use of a 90s symphony orchestra, it really got to people like myself. The music was memorable and you did have that empathic feel for the forest because of the story that was being told. Personally with these elements combined like the first one, it made me cry. An example is when the Fairies gained the spirits of the trees and turned them blue. That's what I loved about the first one. How it impacts you in multiple ways and it never left us when we were growing up. It was sooo full of adventure and we're "discovering" a new world of the rainforest whether it was on land or in water. It reminded us of how much we should appreciate animals and the forest.

My first impression about Ferngully 2 was it's VERY different. The first Ferngully was for not only kids, but also for adults as well. I felt that number 2 was specifically for 3 year olds or something. So throughout the movie I was thinking that I was a 3 year old kid watching the movie. I wanted to watch it for the storyline to see if it was a continuation of a threat to the forest but it's not.

The storyline was not actually based on Ferngully. It's about Ferngully in the first 1/4 of the movie and then later on, it's nothing to do with Ferngully and that was the disappointing part. The storyline needed another huge threat to the forest and the fairies needed to find a way to stop it. Even better, I would've love to see Zack come back or something share the human culture. But because it wasn't based on the forest, my interest in the movie went down and down as I watched it. I started playing my Xbox 360 towards the end.

As mentioned in a previous review, there are new voices. The original cast like Samantha Mathis who does Crista and Robin Williams who did batty. They're all gone and there are new voices for each character. Unfortunately, they were no where near as good as the original cast. I agree with another review that the change of cast was really distracting throughout the movie.

I think it's silly that the director actually thought that he would succeed with this movie by getting a new cast. When a movie has a sequel, it needs to have the same voices. It's like saying, we're going to have Elijah Wood in LOTR in the Fellowship of the Ring and in the Two Towers we're going to have Daniel Radcliff as Frodo. It's not going to work and that's what Ferngully 2 did. The new guy who did Batty sounded almost like Robin Williams, but I would give his voice 6/10 in terms of sounding like the original batty.

This was made in 1998. If I were making the movie, I would contact Robin Williams and the old cast to do the sequel. They would still sound the same after 6 years? Too bad that it's been 20 years and they're all aging and we can't make a better one today.

Remember in the first one that animals didn't have those cartoonish eyes like the Simpsons? The white eyeball with a dot in the middle? Ferngully 2 put those kind of eyes onto the animals in the movie with a bit of eye colour. That totally took away the innocence of the creatures who were in the forest. In the first one, the animals looked like REAL LIFE animals and their eyes were bigger and black. That's what brought the innocence of the animals. But since they have these cartoonish eyes and can even talk, they're not so innocent anymore and as an audience, we know that they're not supposed to do something stupid. This cartoonish eyeball feature brought in the element of a kids movie and I didn't like that at all.

In terms of the music, again, it wasn't as great. It was just simple storytelling music in a kids movie style. It wasn't uplifting and wasn't magical like the first one. It's not even an orchestra. That was very disappointing.

In relation to comedy, I only laughed twice throughout the whole movie. I won't spoil it, but you do see Ralph at some point in the movie and that made me laugh.

There are a few messages in the movie, but they were not implemented in a way that people would remember it. The first one's message is to stop killing our forests but these movie's messages weren't treated seriously but just passing messages.

What I did like about the movie was one of the characters was Australian. His accent was spot on (since I'm Australian) and he was quite funny at times because he's your typical Australian bogan. He was very much like Steve Irwin and he was good.

Overall, I was disappointed with the film and the director should've known that his work wasn't going to succeed. He should've sat down and watched the first one and ask himself "how can I deliver a message that will impact people like the first one did."

I'm really disappointed that out of the 90s movies that came out, this one had to have the terrible sequel.

I really found the first FernGully movie interesting, and liked the idea it got across to young children. Now, the sequel to the hit is about Crysta, of course, and all of her friends. First it's all happy and everything. Everyone in FernGully is having a high-ol'-time. But then something happens...

Two poachers ("Boss" and Mac) come to the woods with two dogs. The two then kidnap the poor baby animals and take them to the circus. On the way out of the forest, they also manage to burn it down. Now, busy with regrowing trees, FernGully puts the fetching of the animals job on the shoulders of Pips and his gang, along with Batty Koda.

Anyways, I was watching this the other night out of boredom, and even laughed some. I think it is a good sequel that lives up to the first FernGully and encourage parents to buy it for their children to add to their movie collection.

How could you ruin the beauty of which the movie first started off as. There's non of that magic that part 1 had. This was my childhood ruined. Non of the love in the last movie continued on to this one. I would love to see a part 3 where they redeem them selves.

In the first movie batty was goofier and lost his antenna? He also has human hands? what why and sadly Robin Williams fit the part just well. Pips changed totally, he acts like the hero instead of the cocky type of guy we used to know in the past.

The graphics, what happened?!? You would improve them from one movie to another. Some how they just degraded!

The original FernGully is one of my all time favourites, it is funny, beautifully animated, moving and even scary in places. Not to mention underrated. In fact, its only problem was that it was too short. However, the sequel, while I didn't think was as awful as the cheap and unnecessary Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy To The Rescue, was very disappointing. It had a nice idea but just didn't work.

There are a couple of redeeming qualities. One was that the music, while nowhere near as good as the original's music(that score is beautiful), was not so bad. Whether it is memorable though that's the thing. Second was that it does have a nice message. Third, the baby animals and Budgie are very sweet and cute.

Sadly, that's where the redeeming qualities end. I will warn you I will be comparing a bit here. This sequel did have some very cheesy moments, and lacked the magic of the first film. One of my first problems was the animation. The original FernGully's animation was colourful, fluid and solid. Here it was rather dull and tacky, plus the colours looked much flatter than they should have done. Also in the original, FernGully itself had a sense of wonder, and it was like a Fairytopia, but I didn't get that here. FernGully seemed rather... how do I put it simply, ordinary I suppose. The writing was also nothing to write home about, and even with the presence of Batty, the whole adventure suffered from a lack of laughs.

The villains were rather lame, compared to the terrifying Hexxus. Hexxus gave me nightmares when I first saw the original at 9 years old, and it was not only how he was animated, but also Tim Curry's (a very talented and underrated actor) imperiously chilling vocal performance. Sadly, the villains, poachers here, weren't at all threatening, and even worse, they were poorly drawn, and most of their dialogue is unbelievably bad. The story admittedly was a nice idea, if only it didn't take such a long time to get going. There are a number of long, drawn out and even pointless scenes, giving the film an uneven sense of pulse.

The characters weren't as likable as they were in the first movie, and I did think overall the voice acting was poor. Crysta has lost her spunk, determination and even vivacity here. And in the sequel, most of it was about Pips, seeing that Crytsta is such a great character, there should have been more of her and she should've gone on the rescue mission too. I am wondering, whether the filmmakers were the same as the original, I would be surprised if so, seeing how much it deviates from the original. And although Zak isn't in this sequel, seeing as his and Crysta's relationship was one of the original's main focuses, I was saddened that Crysta appears to have completely forgotten about him. The character I had the biggest problem with though was Batty. First of all, I hated how he was animated. Secondly, Robin Williams actually made the first movie, he was absolutely hilarious and his humour effortless. However, I didn't like the new voice actor at all, he lacked the hilarity and vibrancy of Williams, and I found him rather loud and abrasive too. It certainly didn't help with the dialogue he was given, how lame was it? Very!

All in all, a hugely disappointing sequel, with very little of the magic of the beautiful original. I almost forgot to mention the ending, it wasn't as powerful or even poignant as the one in the first one. Kids may like it, but fans of the original and adults are guaranteed to be disappointed. 3/10 Bethany Cox