Avatar Sequels: How Disney Gets To Screw FernGully All Over Again

By Simon Gallagher / May 22, 2019

The subject of the exceptional and horribly overlooked FernGully animated movie probably isn't one you think about all that much. You should, because it's great, but it's understandable in that it came out in 1992 and made just over $30m at the box office. It's not exactly held up as a classic of the genre - more like an interesting side note to Disney's domination of that era.

But the performance of that movie was nothing to do with its quality. As the excellent video essay How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams) by the always brilliant Lindsay Ellis reaffirms, FernGully was a victim of a major corporation flexing its muscles because of an issue they thought they could strong-arm their way out of.

As Ellis states, when Robin Williams was signed to play the genie for Disney, it was a marketing ploy designed to take advantage of the new suggestion that animations could be sold on the leverage of their star names. Given the way animations are marketed now, the idea that it wasn't a thing until the early 90s might come as something of a shock, but it simply wasn't.

When Disney got wind and Williams was hired on the back of successes in Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets' Society, they obviously wanted to take advantage of his star power, only to find that Williams wasn't going to let them. He installed a limit on how much they could even use his name in their marketing and point-blank refused to allow them to sell merch using him. They ignored him, the two parties fell out and the entire story is compelling and really worth watching Ellis' video for more detail on.

Interestingly, the video also brings up FernGully's part in all of this mess. Williams already had an agreement in place to voice Batty in that film before he took the Disney deal, but Disney supremo Jeffrey Katzenberg - the man responsible for some of Disney's most profitable movies from the 1990s - believed the actor would simply drop out of the role now that he had his opportunity with Disney.

Williams didn't do as he was expected to, so Katzenberg set about screwing FernGully by sabotaging the production. The film's writer Diana Young revealed that Disney actively sought to stop them renting facilities by paying more (at least twice) and even tried to buy the brewery they were using as their base and turned up to inspect the premises. Talk about your power play.

Katzenberg did have a legitimate reason to be upset with FernGully, because studio head and director Bill Kroyer had poached some of Disney's animators for his new start-up studio Kroyer Films. Having been an inside man at Disney (he worked on The Fox And The Hound and Tron), Katzenberg's headhunting was seen as something of a betrayal, but it wasn't the real reason for Disney's concern over FernGully. That was all Robin Williams.

Fellow former Disney man Jim Cox, who wrote FernGully, was the man who put Williams in the frame for Batty having seen him on the stand-up circuit. He wrote Batty with him firmly in mind, in fact. He also revealed to Vanity Fair that Katzenberg didn't want Willians involved in FernGully at all, because of his agenda to protect Disney's interests:

“Katzenberg did not want him voicing two animated characters in two animated movies at the same time, and tried to force Robin not to do it. Robin was steaming, like, ‘It’s my voice! You can’t stop me.’”

It wasn't just work either. Williams was happy to take the Disney gig despite not wanting them to use him in marketing because it gave him the opportunity to be a part of a huge creative dynasty, but he was invested in FernGully because of the green message, which has long been the reason FernGully has endured amongst a certain section of fans. It's a great movie, it has great performances by Williams and Tim Curry, but its ecological bent gives it even more heart. That's why Williams refused to step away and why Disney had to try and sabotage the movie.

In the end, FernGully was released, complete with William's voice and it made what it made at the box office. It deserved more, but there we go. What must have hurt more, if the Kroyer and Cox were looking at it as a profit-making opportunity was that James Cameron then swooped in with his new-fangled film technology and made Avatar, which couldn't have been more of a FernGully clone if it had tried.

Sure, the magic elements weren't there and Batty wasn't involved (he should have been), but the ecological message and the plot of an outsider coming into a community he didn't understand and learning that they were the side to back rather than his own is all beat for beat FernGully. And then it made $2.8 billion at the box office, while FernGully's $30m began to look even smaller. It wasn't fair and Cameron was never really taken to task.

The fact that James Cameron then announced that he would be making several Avatar sequels (somewhat belatedly), must have gone down even better, since that's probably licence to print several more billions of dollars, as long as the first one works (and it surely HAS to). But what REALLY has to sting is the fact that those Avatar sequels - all of which sprung out of a movie that pretty shamelessly took the same story as FernGully, a movie Disney tried to destroy - will now be made by, distributed by and line the pockets of the very studio that tried to kill FernGully in the first place.

Katzenberg may be long gone from Disney (he left in 1994 to found DreamWorks - done well for himself has Jeffrey), but his intention to crush FernGully into dust now looks like it's taken its final twist. If these Avatar sequels do as well as they have the potential to, who is going to remember FernGully as anything but the strange reason one of Disney's most famous and lauded voice actors fell out very publicly with the company?

And seriously, watch that video from Lindsay Ellis. It's brilliant.