rainforest Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Claude Barras – 2024 – Switzerland – Cert. PG – 87m

French with English subtitles.

*****

An indigenous pre-teenage girl stands up to loggers destroyingthe local rainforest – stop-frame animated feature from the director of My Life as a Courgette is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

From its opening moments in darkness following unsettling creature noises suggesting a jungle forest, followed by jungle forest establishing shots – a frog jumping across a river via a series of stones, a snake slithering around a tree, a baby orangutan (non-verbal voice: soundtrack composer and co-sound editor Charles de Ville) swinging on a branch – it’s clear that this has high ambitions indeed. All the above would be one thing to execute in live action – a few location natural history shots… possibly library footage. In model – or stop-motion – animation, you need to physically build everything in terms of miniature model sets, so to achieve such images is a major undertaking.

Having already set the production bar high, this then pushes it up further with the rasping sound of a chainsaw, as the tree heights on which the baby orangutan and its mother (voice: de Ville again), who has just rescued the infant from the attentions of the deadly snake, are resting suddenly topples into a camp of workers who are going about their allotted task of destroying the creature’s natural habitat.… Read the rest

Ozi
Voice of the Forest

Director – Tim Harper – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 87m

An orangutan girl becomes a social media influencer to stop corporate exploitation of palm oil after her forest habitat is burned in a forest fire – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

The fate of orangutans in countries such as Borneo is dire in the sense that, to facilitate the extraction of palm oil, rainforests are being cleared and burned (in some cases leading to forest fires removing further areas of rainforest). The problem is that the rainforest is the habitat of the orangutan, and they are being left with their natural home severely depleted. It’s a disaster for this species and needs addressing urgently.

Enter this film, which laudably seeks to place that idea in front of family audiences.

Don’t get too excited, though, because having set out to raise consciousness, it attempts to do so with a script that’s overly simplistic and laughable. It starts off well enough, with carefree, small orangutan girl Ozi (voice: Amandla Stenberg) leaping from branch to branch, pulling old orangutan’s tails to knock them off their branches and being rescued from falling into the expectantly gaping jaws of a hungry crocodile by her watchful dad (voice: Djimon Hounsou).… Read the rest