Mjeteconer Just perfect...

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

MortalKombatFan1 Osamu Tezuka's short film "Legend of the Forest" is a short thirty minute film that employs Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony to tell the story of the forces of nature (both natural and supernatural) fighting against humans wanting to destroy their forest home. This experimental production wears its influences of its sleeve, employing numerous animation styles, beginning with realistically drawn still frames, to magic lantern eye tricks, and then changing tempo with fully animated Max Fleischer-like slapstick, a little bit of Winsor McCay (think "Gertie the Dinosaur"), Disneyfied technicolor romance (and pathos) between two flying squirrels, and ending it all with a mash up between "Fantasia" like spirits of the forest and Hanna-Barbera inspired lumberjacks.Well worth checking out for fans of anime and regular old animation in general.

poe426 LEGEND OF THE FOREST (like ASTRO BOY and KIMBA and a great deal of what Tezuka did) gives us someone else's perspective on things- and it's STILL a timely message (more so than ever, actually, with corporations clogging and poisoning our waterways and bringing the world itself to the very edge of Extinction). The fluidity of the animation here is to be envied- especially when one takes into account the fact that this is a film animated by HAND (as opposed to being cranked out on a computer). Says Tezuka himself: "... the joy of creating a film by hand cannot be beaten. Computer graphics makes working today in film very easy, but it also makes the end product cold and banal." (In this, he echoes the sentiments of Ray Harryhausen, who said in one NPR interview that "The magic is gone from animation.") There's form with computer animation, but it's often without substance. Tezuka: "I really wanted to keep the preciousness of the hand animation in the work. But I never want to make this type of film again." (It ain't easy, folks: I once did an animated sequence for a now-defunct website; it wasn't easy.) "Even the large epic animations made by Automation if they lack passion will not be evaluated well," Tezuka pointed out. "I never make work that is careless."

sbwoodside I don't know much about Osamu Tezuka, but he must have been interested in animation's history because he walks through a series of styles here, from stick drawings and repetitive loops reminiscent of the earliest works in the early 20th century, through a progression of Disney and anime styles, and even one section that reminded me of the Flintstones.The storytelling itself follows along in the style of the animations, the types of stories that were told at the time. Simple slapstick at the beginning, some parts very similar to fantasia, and an anime-style ending where rapidly-growing plants kill and smother an entire tree-cutting colony.The overall theme is obviously environmental but with a definite dark angle to it, and it gives this animation a bit of a kick.

MartinHafer 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.