General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Enchanted Forest

The Enchanted Forest (Spanish: El bosque animado) is a 1987 Spanish comedy film directed by José Luis Cuerda, with a screenplay by Rafael Azcona adapted from the 1943 novel of the same name by the Galician writer Wenceslao Fernández Flórez. Set in a magical forest in rural Galicia, it interweaves the stories of bandits, well-diggers, servants, and a ghost, mixing everyday humor with fantasy. It won five Goya Awards at the second Goya ceremony in 1988, including Best Film.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	El bosque animado (Spain, 1987), comedy with fantasy elements³
Director and writer	Directed by José Luis Cuerda; screenplay by Rafael Azcona from the novel by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez¹
Release and runtime	Theatrical release in Spain on 2 October 1987; 108 minutes³^•⁴
Lead cast	Alfredo Landa as the bandit Malvís (Fendetestas), with Tito Valverde, Alejandra Grepi, Encarna Paso, Miguel Rellán, and Fernando Rey¹
Goya Awards	5 wins from 8 nominations at the 2nd Goya Awards (1988): Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Costume Design, Best Original Music²
Box office	€1,325,372.03 in receipts and 694,055 spectators recorded by the ICAA⁴
Later adaptation	A 3D animated version, El bosque animado, sentirás su magia, directed by Ángel de la Cruz, followed in 2001⁵

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The story takes place in a Galician forest where people, animals, and things speak to one another. Its central figure is Malvís, a frustrated day laborer who has become the clumsy bandit Fendetestas and tries to make a name for himself by robbing travelers passing through the forest, without much success because he is too good a person.³^•⁹ Around him move a gallery of characters: the well-digger Geraldo, lame and shy, in love with the beautiful Hermelinda; the working girl Pilara; the ghost of Fiz Cotovelo, condemned to wander the forest as a suffering soul; the Roade sisters; and the lords of the pazo, the summer visitors from Madrid, and a landlady who exploits children.¹⁰^•¹¹

A train that runs along the forest paths, bringing and carrying passengers, serves as the link between the contrasting worlds of poverty and wealth, work and exploitation.² In the film's ending, the ghost of Fiz Cotovelo reappears, a close that the Instituto Cervantes essay describes as considerably gentler than the novel's meditation on the disappearance of the world the writer had described.⁵

Source novel and setting

The film adapts the novel El bosque animado by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, a journalist and novelist born in 1885 in A Coruña, Galicia, who published around forty novels. He spent his summers from 1913 in the Cecebre area, which supplies the setting; the novel was published in 1943.⁶^•⁷ In the book, a large share of the action belongs to the animals of the village and the nearby fraga (forest), whose behavior follows natural instinct rather than moral judgment.⁵

The screenplay by Rafael Azcona, one of the most prominent screenwriters of Spanish cinema, made a deliberate choice: since the film was not an animation, it avoided the animal protagonists and centered exclusively on the human characters, whom Azcona rearranged and connected into a more unitary narrative than the episodic sequence of short stories in the novel.⁵ Azcona introduced variations on the original while trying to preserve the spirit of the book, according to a report filed during the shoot.⁸

Production

The project originated with the producer Eduardo Ducay, and the shoot was commissioned by the production company Classic Films Producción.⁸^•¹² Reporting from El Ferrol in July 1987 put the cost of making the film at 150 million pesetas, of which 75 million had been advanced by the Instituto Nacional de la Cinematografía under the Ministry of Culture; the ICAA catalog records the film as subsidized by the Ministry.⁸^•⁴

Filming took place among oaks and chestnuts in Galicia; when Cuerda called for silence, only the actors' voices, the goldfinches, and the frogs could be heard, since the forest itself shares the film's spotlight. The crew recorded the sounds of the forest directly.⁸^•⁷ IMDb lists the filming location as Sobrado dos Monxes in A Coruña, Galicia, and the Castilla y León Film Commission lists Puerto de Béjar in Salamanca as another location.¹^•¹¹

The technical team included the cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, the composer José Nieto, the editor Juan Ignacio San Mateo, the production and costume designers Félix Murcia and Javier Artiñano, and the producers Eduardo Ducay and María Ángeles de la Guía.³ The ICAA record notes 35 mm Fujicolor stock and a widescreen aspect ratio.⁴

Reception and awards

The film premiered in the Official Section of the 35th San Sebastián Festival in 1987, where it received an OCIC honorable mention from the jury's critics.¹⁰^•¹³ At the second Goya Awards ceremony, held in March 1988, it won five of its eight nominations: Best Film, Best Screenplay for Azcona, Best Actor for Alfredo Landa, Best Costume Design for Javier Artiñano, and Best Original Music for José Nieto; it received one more award than Divinas palabras by José Luis García Sánchez, the next most awarded film that night.²^•¹⁴ It was also nominated for a 1988 European Film Award.¹³

Contemporary critics praised the screenplay's synthesis of an uncontainable book into a conventional feature length, while the El País critic Ángel Fernández-Santos judged Cuerda's direction impeccable but timid, staying within the script's explicit zones.¹⁵ Later assessments have been warmer: El País's 2020 obituary of Cuerda wrote that the film has aged extraordinarily well, and film databases record audience ratings around 7.3 out of 10.⁹^•¹⁶

Legacy and later adaptations

The 1987 film was the first screen adaptation of the novel; later versions followed, with the Angers ecolitt reading guide listing adaptations in 1945, 1987, and 2001.⁶ The 2001 version, El bosque animado, sentirás su magia (released in English as The Living Forest), is a 3D-animated animal fantasy directed by Ángel de la Cruz with Manolo Gómez, returning to the novel's animal cast.⁵^•¹⁷ Ángel de la Cruz has described the 1987 film as a before-and-after for the Spanish audiovisual industry.¹⁸

For Cuerda, the film marked his first experiment with the everyday, familiar surrealism that would define his best-known film, Amanece, que no es poco (1989), and Spanish critics trace the lineage of the country's cinema of the absurd through El bosque animado to later filmmakers such as Juan Cavestany and Chema García Ibarra.⁹^•¹⁹ A 2025 El País retrospective on the Goya Awards noted that, decades on, it remained one of only two films to win Best Picture without its director being nominated for Best Director.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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