There are times when you watch a film and it utterly transforms your life and fundamentally shifts the trajectory of your ambitions and dreams. It becomes the film you watch when things are at their best or worst, helping to refine what you consider good quality and oftentimes reflect the thematic aims of your own creative projects. As a professional film critic, I have been blessed to experience dozens of such films and TV shows, some considered legends and others guilty pleasures, but regardless remain a perpetual element of my memory. I could never forget such films.
Today's review, however, will not be on one of these films.
Instead, I will cover a movie that I definitely remember watching when I was a child, but only in the vaguest of terms and only when I happened to have that memory jogged by some particular mental trigger. Now I've mentioned films like that before, such as Rock-a-Doodle or the animated Dinotopia movie, but today's entry will be special; as it was a film that was born at the same time as FernGully: The Last Rainforest and even had a similar tone and thematic intention, but for some reason is not nearly as remembered (hint, its because of Tim Curry).
Today, we will discuss the 1993 animated adventure film, Once Upon a Forest. Based upon the children's book A Furling's Story by Rae Lambert, Once Upon a Forest is a strange blip in the animated zeitgeist, coming out at a time when animation was picking up in popularity due to the Disney Renaissance and the waning power of Don Bluth, yet it somehow managed to miss the strong nostalgic presence of some of its contemporary environmental films (like FernGully).
Is this forgotten nature deserved? Or is Once Upon a Forest a hidden gem that unfairly managed to slip into the chasm of obscurity?
***