1990s Fantasy Adventure Epic With Beloved Stars Deserves New Generation Of Fans, Stream Without Netflix

Ferngully is a story about fairies living in a rainforest. For the most part, the fairies are peaceful and even once got along well with humans before they disappeared after a fight with a dark and evil spirit. Only a powerful fairy named Magi (Grace Zabriskie) had the power to stop the evil creature and imprison it in a tree, which is how the fairies survived. 

Crysta (Samantha Matis), an apprentice of Magi, is the movie’s main character. She spends a lot of her time exploring the forests and struggles with using her magic. One day, she comes across a bat, named Batty (Robin Williams), who has wiring coming out of his head. 

The bat tells her about humans, and she stumbles across Zak (Jonathan Ward) during her explorations. Zak is a human and a lumberjack cutting down many of the trees in the area. After Crysta accidentally shrinks him, he helps her fight against the evil released when the tree the evil being Hexxus (Tim Curry) was trapped in is cut down. 

FernGully is often called the original Avatar but with fairies instead of aliens. If you’ve watched both, it’s easy to see that there’s a solid comparison there. Both are fighting to protect their home, especially one tree, and the area they live in is being destroyed by humans trying to claim all of the local resources. 

On Rotten Tomatoes, FernGully wasn’t the highest-rated film. Critics gave it 67 percent, and audience members liked it even less, with an average score of 64 percent. However, it did well enough at the box office to be considered a moderate success. 

The story was a little preachy, pushing against development and destroying previous rainforests, which turned off some people. However, the characters, cast, and soundtrack made up for it. The visuals were also pretty good for the time, though they look a little outdated now. 

Batty was easily one of the funniest characters in an animated kids’ film around 1992 when the movie came out, thanks to the amazing Robin Williams. Tim Curry also did a great job with the villain, Hexxus, including during his villain song, “Toxic Love.” 

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Of course, there were some problems. One of the most notable was that the movie was supposedly set in a rainforest in Australia. Despite that, no one, including the humans, has an Australian accent.

The movie also pushed pretty forcefully away from Christianity, talking about how seeds are the creation of life, which turned off many parents and likely helped keep this movie more unknown than others at the time. 

If you want to watch FernGully now that its message holds much more meaning, it’s available on Tubi, Starz, and PlutoTV.