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.
