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?
***
- Produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions
- Directed by Charles Grosvenor
- Running Time: 70 Minutes
- MPAA Rating: G
***
SUMMARY
Set in a forest known as Dapplewood, Once Upon a Forest tells the tale of four woodland animal children (called Furlings); Abigail the Mouse, Edgar the Mole, Russel the Hedgehog, and Michelle the Badger. They live in the forest carefree being taught by Michelle's uncle Cornelius. One day, Cornelius shows the kids a strange black rock that cuts straight through the forest upon which large metal monster move and attack crossing animals. Due to a series of mishaps and lack of care, Dapplewood finds itself inundated with a strange poisonous gas, which takes the life of Michelle's parents and causes her to become dangerously ill. With the poison spreading and all life in the forest at risk, all seems lost.
Desperate to save their friend and home, Abigail, Edgar, and Russel travel to a distant prairie in hopes of acquiring a particular ingredient that could be used to cure Michelle. Along the way, they will face dangerous predators, a band of religious wrens, and a wasteland filled with large yellow monsters; even coming face to face with the dangerous creatures that created the poison gas in the first place.
***
REVIEW
Once Upon a Forest is something of an outlier in my general memory. I absolutely remember watching this movie as a kid and even enjoyed it immensely. However, as an adult I can really only understand it in terms of its similarities to other films. It shares many similarities with The Secret of NIMH and FernGully: The Last Rainforest in terms of tone and thematic intentions, while its plot is basically the exact same as The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists (a bunch of children travel into the dangerous wilderness to acquire a magic flower that will help heal an injured person back home).
And I think it is this inherent inability for me to truly place this film as a stand alone, without comparing it to other films that really begins to indicate why it never really became the classic it could've become. The fact of the matter is is that this is, in many ways, painfully average. It does very little in an extraordinary or transformative manner, simply passable. Its visuals are fine, with lovely backgrounds, smooth and dynamic character designs, but the action sequences can be a bit flighty and often lack weight and substance, coming across as cartoony rather than grounded. I actually do like the character designs as it gives the film a strange Wind in the Willow feel to it all, but it leaves the film sometimes feeling like a very high production made-for-TV special.
The soundtrack is similarly average, which is really strange to me because the soundtrack was composed by James Horner (though 1993 was a busy year for him, maybe he didn't put all his effort into it). I really wanted to like the music, but quite a few songs are just sort of filler-sounding, like its trying to be something out of a Don Bluth film. Once again, the film feels like its copying other movies rather than having an identity of its own. That being said, I do think there are some generally great gems in here. The title song "Once Upon a Time with Me" is a beautiful piece that hearkens the listener to a time of youth, when things were brighter and good always triumphed over evil. Similarly the musical piece "The Accident" is haunting and works to fill the audience with terror and anxiety as the forest is consumed in poison and death. It shows that even if not all the songs work, the ones that do...really work effectively.
From music, we go to characters and messaging, which I think it is important that we combine these two topics because in this film especially, they are linked. Our main cast of child characters is actually quite strong, especially for a 90s kids movie. Our Furling trio, Abigail, Edgar, and Russell fill your expected child stereotypes (the strong girl, the nerdy boy, and the funny fat kid) from that era, but they all manage to maintain a healthy level of charm that doesn't make them too annoying. It could've been easy to mess up and thankfully they don't fall into all of the traps. Of course, that isn't to say that they are perfect characters, as unfortunately they do end up falling into the pitfall of basically never leaving their appointed stereotype...ever. The story arc you think each character will take in the film...you'll be right.
Beyond our main trio, we also have Cornelius, the wise mentor figure, who I think is absolutely incredible as a character and was surprised to remember just how much of the film is devoted to focusing on his trauma with the humans. The side cast is also a fairly ragtag band of misfits and weirdos. We have the innocent Michelle, whose injuries at the beginning of the film motivates the entire adventure, Willy and Waggs the residents of the meadow that the Furlings travel to to reach the flower are charming and I remember as a kid getting really invested in the relationship between Willy and Abigail (even then I was a shipper). We also have Phineas and the wrens, a band of religious zealots that I didn't remember as a kid but have one of the subtlest and most effective lessons I have ever seen in a kids movie from this era.
And I think that word, subtlety, is what really makes this movie stand out from its contemporaries. In many ways, Once Upon a Forest is your bog-standard 90s environmental media, just like The Secret of NIMH, FernGully, or Captain Planet. But where those pieces of media focusing on broad strokes and making simplistic generalizations (industry is bad, love all the trees, people are bad and awful), Once Upon a Forest is more hopeful and its message much more mature. The environmental catastrophe in this film isn't caused by malice, but a combination of carelessness and sheer accident. Humanity didn't seek to destroy Dapplewood (like the humans in FernGully) it just happened as a result of human thoughtlessness, the inability to think of how your actions affect others, a theme which extends to the decisions made by some of our characters as well.
From there, the film goes to great lengths to show how people react to tragedy and how collaboration can work to solve problems that no single individual can solve together. This is best exemplified in the scene with the wrens, that I described earlier. In that scene, our trio comes across a congregation of wrens holding a funeral for a baby wren who is stuck in a pool of oily mud, despite the fact that the child is still alive. Our trio knows that they can save the child, but when they try to get the birds to help them and listen, they ignore them; to focused on the hopelessness and grief, already proclaiming that all is lost and that is the will of the universe that the child should die. Our trio then work together and save the young bird, to the utter astonishment of the congregation. It is a brilliant take-down of apocalyptic thinking and shows the true value in working to solve problems rather than simply proclaiming any difficult issue as the will of God or the universe. Once Upon a Forest calls us to take action and care about the environment, including the people around us.
In fact, it is that last element that makes Once Upon a Forest extrodinary outside of any rating I may give it. This film focuses very much on the living aspect of nature. Nature isn't some vaguely magical force outside of human understanding (like in FernGully or Princess Mononoke) and it isn't just a bunch of trees that we are supposed to love unconditionally and feel bad when someone comes in with a chainsaw. Its bigger than that, its the enormous web of life that connects all creatures and plants together and Once Upon a Forest goes to great lengths to show that everything in the world is reliant on each other to make it all work...including humans.
And that is where Once Upon a Forest triumphs completely. In most other environmentally themed films, humans are always evil. We're greedy, selfish, thoughtless, and always seeking to destroy for the sake of immediate self-interest. The film acknowledges that this is oftentimes true, Cornelius saw the worst of humanity and it stuck with him and he pushes those values onto the furlings, but the film chooses to be subtler about its message. While humans do cause the catastrophe in Dapplewood, they also work to fix it. They end up saving Edgar when he is separated from the group and begin working to clean up the toxic gas that is spread throughout.
Once Upon a Forest is a mess of contradictions. It is a truly unique environmental message that is hopeful and yet grounded and subtle in its execution. It doesn't villainize or patronize, simply teaches and requests sympathy. Even with decent characters and an average plot and soundtrack, the film would be, in my opinion, a guaranteed classic if it had come out five years earlier. But as it is, the film came out at a time when animation was essentially at its peak, when Disney and Don Bluth were at their unchallenged heights. Once Upon a Forest did the unmitigated sin of being perfectly passable and average at a time when classics and legendary films were being released like donuts.
In any other era, Once Upon a Forest would be remembered as fondly as The Secret of NIMH or FernGully: The Last Rainforest, but perhaps it was simply too subtle, too hopeful, too much of what people needed and not enough of what people wanted at the time.
VISUALS
- 7/10
SOUNDTRACK
- 6/10
CHARACTERS
- 6/10
STORY
- 7/10
FINAL SCORE - 6.5/10
***
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