Maybe Marielle Heller’s FernGully Will Be the First Actually Good Live-Action Adaptation?

All across the land, elder millennials today suddenly paused their daily anxious laptop-based tip-tapping and gazed out over the horizon, wondering what had caused their inexplicable frisson of nostalgia. The answer came in the form of a press release: Amazon MGM Studios is developing a live-action FernGully: The Last Rainforest film. And even more alarming, the director attached to this project is Marielle Heller, director of Nightbitch and the Mister Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

For anyone who was not alive and fully capable of operating a VCR in the early 1990s, FernGully is scientifically the most 1992 kids’ movie to ever exist. It stars Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Robin Williams, and Tim Curry. (Williams was cast as the Genie in Aladdin on the basis of his work in FernGully as Batty the fruit bat.) It has original songs by Raffi, Jimmy Buffett, and Elton John. It had an overwhelmingly obvious environmentalist message, enforced by one of the most terrifying animated villains ever drawn. It has a direct-to-video animated sequel, and while movies like The Brave Little Toaster and The Iron Giant have cast longer cultural shadows, FernGully was the VHS tape you knew at least half of your soccer team had a copy of kicking around in their beige-carpeted finished basements.

The idea of a live-action FernGully is already mind-boggling. How will it depict the villain Hexxus, who exists sort of as a ghost and sort of as an oily ooze creeping inexorably into the rainforest as it gets destroyed by evil capitalist loggers? Who should be Crysta the faerie (and will she fly?) and Zak, the logger who gets mysteriously shrunken down to faerie size so he can learn to appreciate the magic of the rainforest? Chris Fleming should get cast as Batty the brain-broken fruit bat, of course, and he should introduce a new generation of children to words like vivisection. But the biggest question is who should play Hexxus, and who can pull off his musical number, “Toxic Love,” a song about loving pollution so much that you make orgasmic sounds about it? No one can do it like Tim Curry, but maybe Tituss Burgess could give it a whirl? Or give it to a pro, a man who loves to take a job, a man with plenty of voice-over experience and a penchant for fascinating pronunciation: Matt Berry.