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). Then, there’s a forest fire, and as her parents flee with her safely in the arms of her mother (voice: Laura Dern), she becomes separated from them. She is found by a pair of animal welfare workers and taken to their wildlife sanctuary. So far, so good.
At this point, the film starts to fall apart, as our young orangutan heroine is taught sign language and fitted with a gizmo (powered by AI?) that interprets her signing as human speech. As if this wasn’t unconvincing enough, she is given a computer tablet to become a social media influencer who can tell the world about the problems faced by orangutans. To alienate the audience still further, manufactured pop music is thrown in at this point on the soundtrack. The welfare workers remove a new tablet she is sent by apparent well-wishers, because the sender is the company responsible for the deforestation.
Despite being well-treated at the sanctuary, Ozi leaves to find her parents, tracking them down to an hermetically sealed park which seems like paradise, except that they no longer have the run of a vast area of the forest like they did before, and their needs are met without their having to do anything such as forage for food. (This is a variation of the holiday camp which is really a nugget farm in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Sam Fell, Jeff Newitt, 2023, which handled its ideas far more competently.)
The place appears to be run by hideous-looking but seemingly friendly crocodile Mr. Smiley (Donald Sutherland, whose distinctive voice acting here represents his final big screen role), but it will turn out that he is in cahoots with the company. Beyond the idea that crocs occupy an unpopular place in the food chain, and are therefore obvious candidates for villains, it doesn’t really make any sense that they would behave in this way.
Ozi suspects that all is not well, and with her friends the monkey Chance (voice:Dean-Charles Chapman) and the rhino Honkus (voice: Urzila Carlson) sets out to escape the park, discover the truth and broadcast it on social media. And *** SPOILER ALERT*** – IF YOU STILL CARE – that’s what she does, despite her tablet getting destroyed as she’s just getting started.
This is, basically, an ill-judged movie about a really important topic that’s simplified to the point that all a little girl (orangutan) has to do to solve the problem is, get on social media and tell everybody. Possibly the most one-dimensional exercise in consciousness-raising ever.
What’s really sad is that much of the technical, computer character animation work and visual character design is impressive and, worse still, Donald Sutherland’s voice-over is genuinely memorable, a nice thing to be able to report for the final movie of his long and distinguished career.
Everything else, though, after the terrific first ten minutes, is a misfire. Its heart may be in the right place, but its brain would appear to have been left on the shelf somewhere. Avoid.
Ozi: Voice of the Forest is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 16th.
Trailer: