This movie isn’t all bad, but it needed at least five million dollars more and twenty “development meetings” fewer to really cook. It has a great villain, Robin Williams doing a dry run for his Aladdin Genie character, and a winning ecological message. But it looks cheap at times and has horrifying creative choices that I assume 20th Century Fox forced on the filmmakers at gunpoint.

The worst part is Zak, the 90s ‘tude hero. For those who don’t understand or remember, “90s ‘tude” is where a piece of media would try to appeal to Generation X but in a phony and corporate way. Have you seen The Simpsons episode where the Itchy and Scratchy Show is losing ratings, so they add a dog with sunglasses? A dog who skateboards, wails on guitar, and says stuff like “remember, kids, always recycle…to the extreme!“? 90s ‘tude is what they’re mocking. It is so heavily parodied that it’s hard to believe it once existed everywhere, unironically. I’d argue the grunge/alt movement itself died because it had been Borg-assimilated by lame, toothless corporatism.

Zak is 90s ‘tude to the extreme! He has a Walkman, a feathered ‘do, and like the first line out of his mouth is “Don’t have a cow. Sheesh!” He’s an utter joke, and when I realized he wasn’t comic relief but the male lead I wanted to tie a rope around my fucking neck.

He’s marking trees for logging in a rainforest when he’s shrunk by the fairy Krysta, who’s never even seen a human dude before, let alone one so radical and tubular. From then on, the plot’s a bog-standard “liar revealed” thing where you tap your fingers impatiently, waiting for Krysta to discover that Zak is there to destroy the rainforest so she can freak out and break up with him but by that point he’s had a change of heart and says he’s sorry but it’s too late because she hates him now but then the big threat arrives and Zak redeems himself by stopping it and then the movie ends and then you clip your toenails and then you notice a weird crusty yellow growth on one of them and you Google what does it mean when your toenail

The plot is perhaps too simple. It’s like they read Save the Cat! or some other screenwriting book and tried to pack a lot of formula characters into a plot that didn’t have room for them. The film has multiple sets of villains whose motives are just “destroy the rainforest”. Human loggers are busy cutting down trees (not noticing that one of their own has been shrunk to three inches in height) when they accidentally free the spirit of Hexxus, a sentient smog cloud that the fairies once imprisoned inside a bottle tree. He takes over their operation and tells them to…continue cutting down trees. Hard sell, but okay.

But it doesn’t matter, because Hexxus is voiced by Tim Curry, who just carries the entire film on his shoulders from that point on. He’s a wonderful character actor and this is one of his flagship performances: a one man clinic on how to turn crap into gold. Even the (otherwise mediocre) animation rallies when Hexxus is on the screen, giving him a sticky, tarlike quality that’s viscerally repulsive. The character and performance is so great it’s almost a detriment to the movie, because it shows how hollow most of the rest of it is.

FernGully has an advanced case of what I call Tim Curry Syphilis. He enhances films (just as the treponema pallidum bacterium is supposed to enhance artistic output) but also kinda causes them to die at the same time. He steals the show, and almost consumes their essence: you don’t care about the rest of the movie, you only want more Tim Curry. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is Patient Zero. Early-stage Tim Curry Syphilis can be observed in Captain Planet and the Planeteers and The Wild Thornberries. We witness the disease’s progression in Legend and The Muppets: Treasure Island. Don Bluth’s The Pebble and the Penguin is dead of Tim Curry Syphilis.

The animation is occasionally really good. The parts where Crysta and Zak are exploring look fantastic.

As a kid I was obsessed with the Leveler (the loggers’ machine), for reasons I cannot explain. The huge arms? The fact that its cockpit is an icosahedron? I don’t know. It’s just cool.

I suspect I love the Leveler because it’s insane. It’s this ridiculous monster truck-looking abomination that makes no sense—why would a machine for cutting down trees be armor-plated like a Panzer tank? Why does it have spiked caterpillar treads that look like a Goth chick’s belt? How would you get it around obstacles like ditches or creeks, and wouldn’t it be smarter to break up the Leveler’s functions among several smaller vehicles (so that a breakdown doesn’t cripple your whole operation?). There’s no reason for the Leveler to exist, but here we are. I share Tim Curry’s appreciation for this fabulous metal panther. What a beautiful machine they have provided!

The part at the end (where Hexxus assumes his true form) is strongly derived from the ending sequence of Fantasia, and works both as a homage and on its own terms. Robin Williams plays a deranged bat. Cheech and Chong do something. Tone-Loc plays a horny goanna who sounds like he wants to fuck Zak instead of eating him. Note that in “Funky Cold Medina”, he says “it’s the eighties, and Tone is down with the ladies!”, implying that in other decades (such as the nineties) he might gay, or at least bisexual. I think I’ll skip the deleted scenes on the DVD.

Moving along, I’m just too old to handle Zak’s radical gnarliness, and Crysta is pretty forgettable. There are two human loggers, one of whom is fat and is called “Tone” by the other. This movie will give him something to discuss with his therapist, Dr Melfi. Why is the movie set in Australia when all of the characters are so clearly American?

I had it in my mind that FernGully was made in Australia. It wasn’t. Australia essentially had no animation industry in the mid 90s, aside from Yoram Gross Films (which made cheap TV shows such as Dot the Kangaroo and Blinky Bill, with animated characters and non-animated backgrounds), Burbank Animation Studios (who had devolved into making shoddy “mockbuster” ripoffs of Disney films), and truly obscure novelties such as Go To Hell!!, a bizarre curio that remains one of the only feature-length animated films created by a single person.

There was certainly no studio capable of a Disney-sized production (or Disney-quality animation) within Australia. The film was financed by the Australian company FAI Films, but all creative personnel and staff appear to have been American (aside from Diane Young, who wrote books that FernGully was based on). Maybe this explains why characters call Fern Gully “the jungle” instead of “the bush”.

While it’s not entirely a failure, FernGully is one of those movies where the main story is absolutely boring, but the peripheral stuff is absolutely captivating. There are a lot of films like that. So far as I’m concerned, the movie’s real cast is Tim Curry, Robin Williams, and the Leveler.

Habfürdö is unique. I’ve never seen a film like it.

An experimental animated Eastern Bloc neo-constructivist musical romantic soap opera (ugh, one of those), it was directed by György Kovásznai, produced by Budapest’s Pannónia Filmstúdió, and watched by apparently no-one. Its commercial failure in 1980 dealt a crippling blow to adult animation in Hungary, but now it’s a beloved curio for fans of the bizarre. If you’ve seen Les Maîtres du temps and Fehérlófia and want to delve further into Hungarian animation, consider cleaning yourself off with a bubble bath.

The film’s most striking aspect is its animation style: it doesn’t have one. The action rictus-spasms at 24 fps from Hergé-style Ligne claire to Dali-style surrealism to Picasso-style cubism to scrapbook collages to real-life footage. Anything goes, and it’s probably for the best that most of the film happens inside one room. Visual comprehensibility is in short supply and we need all the visual aids we can get.

Habfürdö‘s characters slip and squirm through poses like amoebas jolted with electricity. They exist in permanent flux, morphing to reflect their emotions (this gives us a window into what they’re actually thinking; as opposed to their dialog, which is largely a tissue of self-deceptive bullshit.)

Admittedly, “characters changing shape to reflect their emotions” is the oldest trick in the book, but I’ve never seen it done to the extent that Habfürdö does it. In animation, “off-model” refers to when a character deviates from a standard model sheet. Habfurdo’s characters have no model to be “off” from.

What about the story?

The plot could fit on a postcard. Zoltan Mohai, an preening, pretentious “artist”, has cold feet on his wedding day. He hides from the bride at the house of a medical student, whom he burdens with breaking the news that the wedding is cancelled.

I’m not sure why it’s called Bubble Bath (aside from the fact that Zsolt briefly hides inside one). Maybe it’s a clue to the nature of the social relations on the screen. These are vain, silly people living comfortable middle-class lives. People inside bubbles, in other words, one needle-prick away from existential extinction. And although the scenario generates complications (the jilted bride misunderstands what’s happening, and Anna begins having feelings for this preening stranger herself), it’s ultimately all nonsense, a churned-up froth that dissolves on contact with reality.

Technically, Habfurdo is an “idiot plot”—the whole situation would be defused if these people would have one conversation. But the fact is, they can’t. They refuse to confront who they are, and what they actually want.

Why does Zsolt want to escape his marriage to Klára Horváth? Mainly because of a perceived insult from her family. Her mother or someone once referred to him as a “window dresser”, which wounds his pride (he’s a serious artiste!). Yet…it’s true that he’s a window dresser. When he barges in through Anna Parádi’s front door, that’s how he introduces himself! He’s locked in a roomful of mirrors, despising his own reflection.

Likewise, Klára’s marriage-obsession (and sexual promiscuity) come from a desire to project a certain self-image to her social circle. She gloats that the “old maids” at the hospital where she works at are jealous of her debutante’s lifestyle. In the end, she’s making decisions because of what other people think. Left to her own devices, she’ll construct a relationship that’s flawless from the outside and miserable to the ones trapped inside it.

Economist John Maynard Keynes once imagined a beauty contest where women are judged by a panel. The twist: each of the judges is rewarded if their chosen woman is the overall winner. This scenario (which Keynes applied to the stock market) would quickly devolve into farce. The judges would ignore their own preferences, and would only think of of what the other judges prefer. It wouldn’t be a contest of beautiful women, it would be a contest of judges who are judging beautiful women. Today, we call that sort of problem Goodhart’s Law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a measure. Klára doesn’t care about her own happiness. She only cares that the “judges” (her social peers) think she’s happy.

Habfürdö isn’t a character study. There is no effort at psychological realism. Characters are written the way they are drawn: as ludicrous, bizarre freaks. Everything they do is abhorrently strange, yet we see the social parallels.

The dirty secret behind animation (even “realistic” animation) is that it’s essentially a bag of tricks. Think of the “Milt Kahl head swaggle”. When have you ever seen this gesture in real life? Or the Dreamworks Face. If you saw a real person make that expression, you’d assume they were suffering a stroke. But when those things appear in an animated world, we assign meaning to them. (head swaggle = character has smug confidence, Dreamworks face = character is sassy and full of ‘TUDE and also you should probably skip this movie). They are visual shorthand. They don’t depict real life, they hint at it.

Habfürdö’s characters are written in the same stylized way: unrealistic on the face of things, but it nudges your mind to toward topics that are too realistic for comfort. It’s the old divide of how you can be truthful without exactly being factual. More than anything, Habfürdö is a truthful film. Bubbles might seem insubstantial, but they hint at a powerful chemical reaction. Ignore them at your peril.

You soon discern that the point of the movie isn’t these characters, it’s modernity, and urbanism, and the pressures faced by men and women who live like termites in gray apartment complexes. I’m sure that it would make more sense to someone raised in the land of “Ghoulash communism”. I got the sense that much of the film was flying over my head.

But Habfürdö mostly doesn’t take itself seriously. The plot is casually constructed. A fourth character is introduced, a boxer called Nandi. He is absolutely pointless. He ends up getting drunk and passing out.

And sometimes the movie’s experimental nature excuses its excesses. The film begins with a wildly overambitious 3D panning shot over medical student Anna Parádi’s apartment. In a Disney movie, it would have looked inexcusably sloppy. In the context of Habfürdö’s abstract style, it works.

Habfurdo is an odd beast. Even now, I’m not sure I have a handle on what it’s trying to do. Habfürdö‘s visuals have a restless joy that infects the viewer. It makes me happy. I think that’s enough!

A plodding anti-religion parable set on an alien planet, Kaena: The Prophecy’s flaws seem to justify its “nobody’s heard of it” status. Despite some inspired ideas (and an intriguing erotic-techno-biophilic setting), it’s watchable mainly as a study of wasted potential. If a ever fire burned in this film, it went out long ago.

It’s a French CGI film from 2003, created by Chris Delaporte and Patrick Daher, and produced by Xilam on a budget of $26 million. It grossed just $2,173 on its opening weekend. You’d have made more money in March 2020 with an educational film titled How To Lick Every Surface At Your Local Pub.

Kaena was released on DVD, where it theoretically could have recouped its losses. Considering the DVD’s 87 Amazon reviews, far fewer than heavy-hitters like Morbius (3,488 reviews) or Mars Needs Moms (1,151 reviews), I’m reasonably certain that Kaena: The Prophecy did not Kaena: A Profit See.

I will attempt to describe Kaena’s story. My ability to do so is hindered by the reality that it’s confusing and I don’t care.

A spaceship crash-lands on an alien planet. Its crew is massacred by the natives (vicious blobs of sap called Selenites), but the ship’s sentient core survives, sprouting into a gigantic tree called Axis that extends a hundred miles into space. We then jump ahead six hundred years. A primitive humanlike race of creatures now lives beneath the branches of Axis, high above clouds that (from their upside down perspective) they regard as the sky. They slave tirelessly to harvest sap for the ground-based Selenites, who have tricked them into thinking they’re gods. Until one day, a girl named Kaena grows curious about what’s really beneath the sky.

The setup’s there, but the delivery isn’t. Kaena’s lore-heavy setting (with several races, superintelligent AIs, and two species of genetically engineered worms) is more complicated than you want in a movie where the villain is a blob of sap. The story also has an incomplete, threadbare quality, as though you’re playing a videogame with half the cutscenes erased from the disk, and it’s often hard to understand what’s happening, or how event B connects to event A.

My guess is that important scenes were written and storyboarded, and then cut due to financial constraints. I don’t know if that’s true, yet it often felt that Kaena’s writers expected me to know facts without having troubled themselves to explain them to me.

The villain’s entire motive is that she wants to avoid “fusion”, which apparently is how the Selenites reproduce. (The vizier gently tells the queen that she must think of her species’ future. The queen scornfully retorts “You are the last male! You crave fusion with me!” She’s got us males figured out, I guess.) I don’t understand what fusion entails, or why she doesn’t want to do it, so her behavior is incomprehensible. If the Selenites depend on sap from Axis’s trunk to survive, why are they trying to destroy the ship’s computer, which is obviously the source of the tree? And the tree didn’t exist until the ship arrived, so where were they getting sap from before?

The film has a lot of “coupon shots”: my term for a money shots that is ruined by the fact that you don’t understand or care about the big reveal. In the third act, the character Opaz reveals a secret about Axis’s true nature. It’s played up as a big moment. Kaena reacts in awe. I reacted with “so what?” I couldn’t see how it affected anything.

The film seems to piously insist that it has a brilliant concept, and that this should excuse its every shortcoming. A tree in space! A race that lives upside down! They stare up at heaven…and it’s the Earth! Isn’t that profund? Heaven is on Earth!

But movies do not exist in their outlines. I cannot watch concepts. Kaena’s plot isn’t compelling in the slightest. It’s “Noble savages with a magic tree are enslaved by a technologically superior race who are posing as gods, then a rebellious teenage girl with mystic visions goes on a hero’s journey to save them”. In other words, dead husk-like fragments of FernGully, Pocahontas, Princess Mononoke, The Prince of Egypt, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, and A Bug’s Life, coated in obscurantist Franco-glaze. You may as well watch James Cameron’s Avatar, which adapts about 75% of this movie’s plot without even realizing it, and at least makes the tree-worshipping cat people sparkly blue instead of poop-brown.

On that note…how does the the film look?

Kaena herself is superbly bouncy and appealing. She’s constantly in motion: leaping and falling and tumbling and getting ragdolled around by physics. She’s ruthlessly designed to strike one chord in teenage girls, and a different, louder one in teenage boys.

Other parts of the movie look awful. As in, “Welcome to 1994, we are now watching Re:Boot outtakes and the animators are on drugs” awful. I do not support abortion, but if I saw someone slinging this child’s coathanger-riddled corpse into a Planned Parenthood dumpster, I would not tell a soul. Some things are for the greater good.

The rest of Kaena’s tribe look nondescript, in a featureless “NPC in a cheap videogame” way. The eye stares straight past them.

2000-2004 was “the best of times, and the worst of times” for CGI. The technology could look incredible, but it was still novel (and expensive) enough that objectively horrible shit was regularly defecated into theaters.

Kaena embodies this cinematic weltanschauung: here you get incredible and horrible, in one movie! There’s a huge unevenness in how the film looks, as if it was made not just by different people but by different studios.

The making-of documentary behind Kaena is informative. The film was worked on piecemeal by various people, many of whom had no business making a movie at all. I was not surprised to learn that Kaena was originally meant to be a videogame. It began almost a decade earlier at Eric Chahi’s Amazing Studios (Out of this World has a faint but recognizable influence on Kaena‘s style). 1995 was an era of multimedia-heavy games that blurred the line between cinema and videogaming, and after Toy Story‘s success (and some encouraging feedback from Lucas and Spielberg), Delaporte and Daher left Amazing and began work on a “cinematic” game called Gaina.

Gaina was soon re-imagined as TV movie called Axis, and then rebuilt again as an animated feature. Delaporte and Daher were game developers, and they made a movie that doesn’t feel like one. They animated it with commercial 3D software of the sort used by videogame developers, such as Discrete’s Character Studio. Certain details—like the hands of characters—aren’t as detailed as they would be in a Pixar film. After all, you don’t have detailed hands in a game.

The project bumped along for years, held back by outdated tools, an inexperienced team, and the eventual bankruptcy of Delaporte’s studio. Kaena was bought by Xilam Animation (of Oggy and the Cockroaches fame), and hauled over the finish line, after rehiring most of the original team.

I’ll say this: some of the animators and character designers knew what they were doing. Kaena herself is great, and so are the Selenites, who have a creative HR Giger-inspired design. Their environment is cleverly conceived: a vile, chiaroscuro’d hellhole that seems made of congealed maple syrup.

Kaena definitely could have used more money, but writing is cheap, and that’s the part where it falls apart.

The villains are puzzling in their motives. Opaz is has been doing nothing for six hundred years. The worms are Timon and Pumba style comic relief characters that can fuck off. Kaena, the cynosure at the film’s center, lacks any sort of characterization at all. She’s just a plucky young teenager who is saintly and good and always ready to stand up to authority.

The human village is ruled by a grating one-note character, clearly meant as a stand-in for organized religion. His every line of dialog is some version of “The gods are testing us!” and “The gods are demanding another harvest of sap!” He turns into a droning irritating presence, without any depth or nuance. At times the movie becomes an atheist screed, three years before that was popular. But the film’s “think for yourself” bona-fides are questionable, since Kaena’s basically a mystic herself, motivated by dreams.

2003 was probably a bit late to make a movie like Kaena. It wants to be a vaguely edgy movie aimed at teens. Treasure Planet and Titan AE had already tried that, and flopped. I think the world just saw another unmarketable foreign movie, and passed.

Many such cases. In 2003, CGI was still regarded as a groundbreaking new art form instead of a movie-ruining plague, and we had a whole trend of lavish CGI “films” that were actually more like hundred-million-dollar Maya showcases (think Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Polar Express). The Hollywood press would reliably hype them with breathless technobabble about 360 degree mocap and realistic light specularity and characters with 60,000 individually animated strands of hair, along with speculation that human actors would soon be obsolete.

It was a bubble. Most of these films failed, losing their studio tens of millions of dollars and sometimes bankrupting them in the process. In reality, only Pixar and Dreamworks could reliably score a chunky 3-5x return on a CGI film, and nearly everyone else was left holding a bag (usually one with poorly-animated cloth physics). Even Disney got burned a bunch of times before figuring out a formula. With a few exceptions (Ice Age made a bunch of money, somehow), there wasn’t a CGI boom, there was a Pixarworks boom.

(We see a similar trend today with superhero franchises. People regard them as this omnipresent thing that can’t fail, but actually, the only studio making it work is Marvel. DC’s Extended Universe failed, and Universal’s Dark Universe sputtered out after one movie. The plates are kept spinning by Kevin Feige’s diabolical touch. When he dies or leaves the company, who knows what will happen?)

Kaena got caught right as the industry bubble burst. (A new one, of course, started with 3D, and Avatar). But even if had come out in 2001, it has severe problems. It’s dark and confused and slow. It’s loaded with rampant fanservice that would probably repulse parents and female viewers. The action scenes come and go. The animation is literally the horse drawing meme for ninety minutes, swapping competence for incompetence at random moments. The fluid physics and realistic hair are paired with characters that look like they’re from a shitty TV show or web series. There’s exposition instead of action. The movie’s modal scene is “dollar-store Ent philosophizes about the nature of being to a girl wearing clothes so fetishistically tight you could diagnose a uterine cancer in her pelvis”. If you want that sort of thing, check out Aeon Flux.

Kaena is a rough movie to love. It’s more of an archeological dig than a film: I’m disinterested in what the movie is, but fascinated by what it was originally trying to do. Almost all bad movies have a murdered good movie hiding in the frame, and that’s definitely true in this one’s case.