Legend of the Forest

Because it's set to classical music and features woodland animals, I guess it's easy to think of Fantasia at first, when watching Legend of the Forest. It ends up being pretty different, though, switching things up when it came to animation style throughout dramatically.

Those switch ups are so dramatic that Legend of the Forest even began with what was basically a slideshow presentation. I can't lie; I was a little worried the whole half-hour short would be like that, but thankfully it wasn't.

It's broadly got an environmental message, though it gets weird in the details. It feels like it derails at a certain point and opts to become more surreal, but I kind of dug that. It's always interesting to look at and sounds good.

Sure, it might not come together entirely, but it doesn't feel like it's trying to come together necessarily. It's a neat piece of animation and typically imaginative for the continually fascinating Osamu Tezuka.

At times, THE LEGEND OF THE FOREST is a lovely film technically. However, at the same time, the anti-human race/pro-nature message sure seemed heavy-handed and ridiculous--ruining the film for me.

The film is unusual in that it has different animation styles in each of the movements of a piece of music by Tchaikovsky. It's a very interesting idea, though the quality is wildly uneven. The first segment is done as a slide show and although the drawings are nice, it's still like a slide show. Later, some of the sequences are very cartoony (almost like an episode of "The Smurfs") and some are lovely and quite artistic. So the animation is a real mixed bag.

As for the story, there is no dialog--just music. Each of the sequences consist of evil humans plundering the forests and the adorable humanized animals fighting back for the forces of niceness. But, with such blatant propaganda, the message seems to be less to conserve and manage our resources but that people and progress are evil! This proselytizing became so bad that towards the end, the leader of the humans looked like the spitting image of Hitler!!! I am NOT kidding about this and it took a lovely idea for a film and turned it into irresponsible propaganda--sort of like a higher quality version of "Captain Planet" that showed that the world is threatened by the evil corporations!

My advice is to try to find one of the director's less preachy films such as JUMPING or BROKEN DOWN FILM. Otherwise, you might become a mind-numbed nature worshiping idiot who sees humans as expendable.