2024-07-24 00:27:10
(by correspondent Cinzia Conti) (ANSA) – GIFFONI VALLE PIANA, JULY 23 – “The forest: one of nature’s greatest creations, home to more than half of all living species and all these millions of lives, just one is enough to change the world”. These are the words that form the starting point of the animated feature film Ozi – Voice of the Forest, the latest piece in Leonardo DiCaprio’s great commitment to the environment, which premiered last night to applause at the Giffoni festival (and is expected in theaters from Thursday, September 19). To make it clear right away that no one can hesitate or back out and that this concerns us all. And if Disney’s Bambi did so much to silence many hunters’ doubles, who knows whether Ozi, directed by cartoon genius Tim Harper (nominated for a Bafta for “Andy Pandy”) and distributed by Notorious Pictures, will not be able to make people understand that a plan B for safeguarding mother earth does not exist. The original dubbing cast of the film is truly exceptional, starting with the recently deceased Donald Sutherland. With him also Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games) who lends her voice to Ozi, Laura Dern (Marriage Story), Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond), RuPaul (RuPaul’s Drag Race), Dean Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones) and Rachel Shenton (All Creatures Great and Small). As the other producer of the film Mike Medavoy recently explained: “Everyone we asked said yes”. They feel the eco-anxiety well here in Giffoni. Both the young – a historic question last year about the future of the environment was asked by a girl that even made a minister of the Republic, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, burst into tears – but also the children. And this story of the small and adorable orangutan Ozi who lives happily in the forest with his parents is addressed to children. But this quiet doesn’t last long, because as one of the light-hearted protagonists explains later, “forever doesn’t exist these days, everything has a duration. One moment you have a house and the next you don’t, nothing is forever…”. In fact, human intervention, including fire, destroys Ozi’s world and separates her from her mother and father. Then she is “saved” by the same race that condemned her: a group of “good” volunteers to create which producers and screenwriters have worked for a long time with “real” environmentalists, such as Dr. Karmele Llano Sanchez who runs an orangutan orphanage similar to the one that appears in the film and leads campaigns against deforestation. So Ozi even learns to communicate with sign language (after all, as the volunteer who saves her says: orangutans are almost as intelligent as humans) and becomes what many children and young people dream of: a viral and beloved influencer. But there is a new twist in his small and troubled existence: he discovers that the parents he feared he had lost are alive and sets out with a little monkey who has swooped into his new life from nature to find them. The film, as the producers say, does not want to be a “medicine” but an intelligent thing that first of all makes you have fun (and the kids of Giffoni laugh heartily) but also think. Think not only about the damage to the environment continuously done by man but also about the false green commitment of some multinationals peddled only to grab new contracts and even more money. After all, as screenwriter Rodrigo Blaas effectively summarized, “we human beings are a walking paradox. At the same time that we take care of our families and our environment, in reality we also damage it”. (ANSA).
2024-07-24 00:27:10