Produced by nature-lover Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way, this is a passable eco-primer for the younger generation, but a limp bit of storytelling about the eponymous junior orangutan (voiced by Amandla Stenberg). Its flower-topknotted hero is a kind of simian Greta Thunberg, bent on using her influencer clout to protect her rainforest home from an evil corporation, but the film doesn’t exactly lead us into Watership Down territory.
Anthropomorphism these days doesn’t just mean talking animals; it means they use tablets and social media as well. (There’s something a bit wrong about that in a film about the sanctity of nature.) No matter: after being separated from her parents in a Lion King-esque conflagration, Ozi is brought to an animal sanctuary where she takes to technology like an ape to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Her human carer draws the line, though, at her using a device from Greenzar, the company responsible for orphaning Ozi in the first place. But the chimpfluencer won’t stay away, especially when she realises her folks are still alive in the corporation’s shiny biosphere.
The animation at least is excellent, with spry character models and storybook relief. But the dialogue is vapid, and the cast of fauna feels like a scrape of training data from Madagascar and, in the case of feisty but dumb rhino companion Honkus, the dog from Up. Fortunately, after Ozi, Honkus and a larcenous, estuary-accented monkey called Chance pierce Greenzar’s enclave, the film becomes a bit less generic, packing in broadsides at deforestation, palm oil monoculture and modern alienation from the natural world.
It’s all in the service of upbeat eco gong beating that may recruit a few younger viewers to the cause. However, there is something a bit insidious about its blind faith in social media activism, omitting how it is intertwined with the technological lobby that is the vanguard of destructive capitalism. Donald Sutherland gets his final screen credit here, voicing a collaborationist crocodile. But a dose of actual Hawkeye rebelliousness is what this pious animation really needs.
• Ozi: Voice of the Forest is in UK cinemas from 10 August.
