Can someone tell me the name of this TV movie?

November 4, 2005 11:49 PM

Can someone tell me the name of this TV movie? There are some spoilers here if you haven't seen this, but there's no other way to try to identify it.

A man or woman, or maybe a couple, live in a house near a forest. They meet some new people. Unbeknownst to them, these new people are really birds from the forest who have taken human form. They make friends and one of the new people moves in with one of the real humans. It goes well enough until the human starts cooking a chicken. The bird-person is horrified. But he/she does not say so directly, but starts painting bloody images, death scenes, etc. on the walls. Clearly the relationship is not going to work out. The bird-people apparently form an unfavorable conclusion about life in human society. They abandon human form and go back to live in the forest.

It was a well-made, haunting movie. The time period (when it was made and broadcast) was about 1970's, and the setting was contemporaneous. I thought the title was something like "Birds" or "Forest" or "Trees" or something along those lines, but all my Google and IMDB searches with variations of such titles have turned up nothing.

It's not just my imagination. In addition to seeing it on TV I saw a review and recommendation in a book, one of those pre-IMDB alphabetical guides to movies.

posted by jam_pony to media & arts (14 answers total)

Hmm. Could it be Fantastic Planet?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:29 AM on November 5, 2005

"This film takes place on a faraway planet where giants rule..." - no, this was realistic and Earthbound.

It's strange when things disappear without a trace.
posted by jam_pony at 12:41 AM on November 5, 2005

Well... if you saw it today it would probably just look silly to you...
I can't tell you how many times that has happened to me with movies or books I loved from my childhood.
posted by shanevsevil at 8:05 AM on November 5, 2005

Here's a clip from Rene Laloux's "Fantastic Planet" with haunting soundtrack
posted by growabrain at 8:10 AM on November 5, 2005

Could it be a twilight zone episode?
posted by duck at 12:59 PM on November 5, 2005

I thought Fantastic Plant was about giant blue robots who take humans as pets, with tracking collars. Doesnt really sound like what jam_pony is looking for?

jam_pony, is it animated?
posted by ORthey at 2:42 PM on November 5, 2005

Is it Harpya?

A man sees someone trying to drown a woman in a fountain. He clubs the man and rescues her, only to discover that she is a harpy, a woman bird monster. He takes her home to nurse her back to health, but she eats all his food and his parakeet, and then his legs to keep him prisoner. When he escapes one day to find food, she follows, and when he tries to strangle her a police officer clubs him to save her, thus starting the cycle over.

You can watch it online at AtomFilm's website.
posted by peppermint22 at 2:49 PM on November 5, 2005

I was intrigued by this question and had a good poke around for half an hour with no luck. Are there any other details at all you can remember, like what country the film was made in (accents? dubbing?) that might help narrow the search a bit? Was your description the main plot of the movie or an episode within a bigger story? Are you sure that it was a made-for-TV movie?
posted by teleskiving at 4:20 PM on November 5, 2005

Not Fantastic Planet. That excerpt is remarkable, tho, and I may look for the whole thing based on that.

It was not animated. Not Harpya. It was a stand-alone (not part of a series) movie. It was set in the then-present, late 20th cerntury, in USA I think.

Thanks for answers so far!

I was hoping someone here would have seen it. As noted, I saw a review in a book as well as the film itself on TV. IMDB and reference books probably have it, but without a title, actor or director name, there's no way to look it up.
posted by jam_pony at 4:44 PM on November 5, 2005

Out of curiousity, is it an episode from something like "Outer Limits" or "Twilight Zone"?
posted by WCityMike at 5:24 PM on November 5, 2005

I don't want to alarm you, but you may have slipped into an alternate universe. You see, occasionally we find ourselves remembering something that doen't exist, or swearing up and down that we never said something someone else claims we said. It is my theory that when this happens, our consciousness has, unbeknownst to us, slipped into an alternate universe where everything is identical to our previous universe, except for the existence (or non-existence) of the TV show, movie, building, person, or conversation in question.

The good news is, you've now got a great idea for a movie that has never been made, so go out and make it!
posted by Rock Steady at 7:16 AM on November 6, 2005

Seriously, though, have you tried googling for very specific phrases that would be used by someone discussing the movie? I recently got an email from someone thanking me for using the specific phrase "dance for food" when discussing a William Sleator book here on AskMe. It seems they had been googling this phrase occasionally for sometime, in order to find the name of the book.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:20 AM on November 6, 2005

Sounds like the Jakovosaurs episode of South Park ...
posted by LilBucner at 11:39 AM on November 7, 2005

If you scroll down this page to "Chapter 7: Birds", you'll find that this book at the end of each chapter lists novels, stories and movies with the appropriate animorphism theme... this book lists 6 movies about bird to animal transformation. I'm willing to bet you can find the answer to your question in this book. Why not pop by your local library, see if they have it?
posted by degnarra at 11:54 AM on January 5, 2006