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Bosque animado, El (1987)

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the best Spanish rural comedies ever..., 17 junio 2006

Author: Henry Fields (kikecam@teleline.es) de Spain

Malvís (Alfredo Landa) is sick of working like crazy for nothing. He'd rather become a bandit, that's much better, he's gonna be the fearful Fendetestas! He'll spread panic in the woods of his region. But there's a little problem: there aren't much people living in his region, everyone knows everyone and everyone is so poor, so is gonna be difficult that someone takes Malvís/Fendetestas too seriously.

This is a magic history, so funny, and full of situations that will make you laugh. It's also full of characters that belong to the Spanish idiosyncrasy: the strict priest, the Guardia Civil, the old devout women, the village idiot... there's even a lost soul wandering around the woods.

The great Alfredo Landa heads a cast that gathered together the best two generations of Spanish scene: from Fernando Rey to Encarna Paso, from Manuel Alexandre to María Isbert... A cast like that would be just unthinkable nowadays. "El Bosque Animado" was the first movie of José Luis Cuerda's trilogy of rural comedies (after this one he made the surreal "Amanece Que No Es Poco", and "Así En El Cielo Como En La Tierra". Those are movies so personal that stress the Spanish culture. The young directors should take note of films like "El Bosque Animado", instead of trying to be the new "enfant terrible" and imitating US worst cinema.

*My rate: 9/10

3 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Un-magic and un-Galician, 17 mayo 2004

Author: DwightFry de Burela, Lugo, Spain

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

(WARNING: This might contain minor spoilers).

It's amazing that, being based in one of the most magic books of all time, and having between its characters a spirit and a witch, this movie is almost completely devoid of magic. The novel, delightfully charming from start to finish, is pretty much unfilmable (more than half of the main characters are animals of the forest), and making a film out of it about the human characters only is a good and honest try, but almost all what made the book good is lost in this final product. First, in the movie the forest is just a set piece, while it should be a character itself, I mean, it should in some way interact and cast its influence upon the humans, not just being a physical place or location. And while animals can not realistically be given voices in a live action film, they should be more present than a couple of brief shots of an owl and a mole. The human characters aren't much better. While the cast is for the most part fine, they all belong in another movie. The "bosque animado" story is so unmistakenly Galician (Galicia is the Celtic region in the Northwest of Spain, an unique land of natural magic and legends) that it can't work when acted out by a non-Galician cast and directed by a non-Galician. I'm no Nationalist, but there are things that just can't be imitated, and the Galician sense of life and humor is totally different from the rest of Spain. And what we ultimately have here is a story about how people from Madrid think the magic Galicia is, and they're totally wrong. The characters' behaviors are never believable as belonging to the land, and all comes together as a foreign story set in a Galician landscape. Alfredo Landa is a great actor, but it's impossible to forget he's Navarre while seeing his Fendetestas (Galician for "Head-crusher"), as is obvious that Fernando Valverde is someone from a big city acting out someone from a small village. The late, great Fernando Rey (one of the very few Galician-born actors in the film) is horribly wasted as filthy rich D'Abondo (literally, Galician for "Enough", but more in the sense of "More-than-enough"), a character that in the novel is hateful and whose greed and his wife's causes the death of a pivotal animal character. In the film, he is reduced to nothing. And the main story among the many characters is, in the movie, the love story between crippled Geraldo and beautiful servant Hermelinda, but it's done in the typical 80s Spanish melodrama style, trashing the poetic story in the book where the love story is only possible after their death. In the movie, they get to have sex in an attic while two posh ladies from Madrid hear them and think they're ghostly noises (a typical Spanish cinema moment, extraction of humor out of sex, something not in the book.

In 2001, another movie version of the book was made, this time fully computer-generated and about the animal characters only (the only characters common to both movies are D'Abondo and his wife). The result was an unwatchable and anachronistic Disney-Pixar wannabe. It seems that it's impossible to get the story right on screen.

4/10. Try to find the book and read it, you'll be delighted from the start to the final line.

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