You’d be forgiven for not knowing that Disney Animation had a new film out this fall. You’d be forgiven for not knowing that this film was released in theatres, before quickly and unceremoniously making its way to Disney+ less than a month later. You’d be forgiven for these things because Disney, the largest motion picture company in the world, barely bothered to advertise its existence. Being released sandwiched between Wakanda Forever and the long-awaited Avatar sequel, both films that Disney had billion dollar hopes for, was also surely a sign of Disney’s indifference. After watching the film, the word that has mounted itself at the forefront of my brain regarding the totality of the film is in fact unceremonious, from script, to performance, to release.
I don’t agree with former Disney CEO and “guy who did his job bad and got fired” Bob Chapek when he said that adults aren’t interested in cartoons. Cartoons are one of my favourite mediums of filmmaking, and Disney – despite the company’s more toxic business qualities – has spent 100 years keeping cartoons relevant in the culture. And for most of that time, they’ve understood that adults want to watch them too. Not for some nostalgic dopamine hit, but because they stand on their own as (mostly) good films. Now, I don’t have children, and I don’t know how Strange World plays for a child. But as an adult, I found it simplistic to a fault. It felt like a first draft of a script, with a litany of good ideas that never bothered to get whittled down, fleshed out, or explored in a meaningful way. The building blocks are there, but something must be built with them to them to have substance.
Strange World is from Don Hall and Qui Nguyen, the team that created the far superior Raya and the Last Dragon – for my money, one of the better Disney Animation pictures in recent years, and one of the early victims of the pandemic streaming dump. There is much in the DNA of Strange World that makes it the sci-fi mirror to Raya’s high fantasy. However, while the world of Raya was detailed and her journey given deep emotional heft, Strange World flops ninety minutes of half ideas out onto the screen with barely an interest in any of them. It seems like every possible crisis point is resolved in the scene immediately after the crisis is presented. There is no cohesion that knits the ideas into an overarching and advancing plot, and seemingly no interest in exploring anything in great detail.
Strange World is the story of three generations of the Clade family, performed by – from eldest to youngest – Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Jaboukie Young-White. These three men are terminally incapable of having open emotional conversations with one another, and that creates the nearest thing to an emotional throughline in the film. Jaeger (Quaid) is a famous explorer, who wants his son Searcher (Gyllenhaal) to follow in his foot steps. Searcher is a farmer who wants his son Ethan (Young-White) to follow in his footsteps. Ethan wants to be an explorer like Jaeger. Perhaps the biggest issue facing the film is that it’s never clear exactly who the film is focused on. Most Disney films go for the teen protagonist, but neither Searcher or Ethan have their emotional perspective clearly delineated enough for the audience to fully sympathize with either. This might be because neither have much emotional depth. They both just sorta sulk about how their dad’s don’t listen about what they want, until (spoilers) their dad’s listen about what they want.
There has been much discourse recently, thanks to the Chris Pratt casting as Super Mario, that professional voice actors aren’t given the respect they deserve in A-list animation. This is aggressively true, and worth discussing further in the future. It is especially evident in a film like this. Both Quaid and Gyllenhaal are terrific actors in a conventional movie but here their performances bring no energy at all to the Clades. I didn’t even clock that it was Gyllenhaal until the credits rolled, which is fine when the actor is able to disappear into a voice and a performance. This isn’t disappearance, this is wallflowerism. Without that spark of energy from the performance, your eyes just glaze over the film, not even distracted by the alien, Jules Verne-esque environment animated around them.
Successful world building is a miracle of storytelling. Most Disney films are adept at this; I would go so far to say that it is one of the strengths of the company is breathing life into incredible fantasy worlds we’ve never seen before. The strange world of Strange World feels like they came up with the final reveal, tried to work backwards from that idea, and struggled to execute. The plot of the film is that Searcher discovered a miraculous source of energy that has transformed Avalonia, his isolated community, into a cottage core steampunk paradise. Suddenly though, the energy source begins to fail – for reasons that never seem to be explained, which is fine because the movie kind of forgets that this is the plot anyway – and Searcher and the President of Avalonia (Lucy Liu, in a thankless and largely pointless role) for some reason descend underground to discover why the magic energy is waning. There, they discover pink pterodactyls, weird squids, a blue goo creature Disney clearly hoped would sell toys, and an assortment of other dinosaur-inspired fungus monsters. Except the monsters are never really threats, and never feel threatening. The twist at the end regarding the nature of all the creatures feels empty because nothing leading up to it progressed in a way that made it feel earned, or an organic revelation. It’s just another idea the film shows us, then walks away from.
The cynic in me wants to think that Disney failed to promote the film in any significant way because Ethan is an out gay character. That despite claiming pretty much every time they’ve released a new film in the past ten years that it features the company’s “first gay character,” this time they actually did it. Ethan has a crush on a boy that is also a speaking role. He discusses this crush with his grandfather, and it isn’t made any more a deal then if they were discussing a heterosexual relationship. It’s a big deal for representation. It’s also why the film wasn’t released in 20 countries. The cynic in me wants to think the Disney quietly released Strange World so as not to draw attention of this plot line from the American right, who has been battling Disney since last year and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. However, the realist in me thinks it’s a lot more straight forward then that: they didn’t think the movie was that good. They saw it, they had spent millions of dollars and several years making it, but knew their marketing budget was better spent promoting their Marvel movie and the wet smurf cats. Which is fine. It does make me wonder why they released it in theatres at all, when they’ve dumped better and more high profile films to the Plus over the past year.
Strange World is available to stream.
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Atlantis: The Lost Empire
When it was released in 2001 Atlantis was one of Disney’s biggest flops, especially coming at (what would be) the end of the animation renaissance that had carried the company back from the brink of financial ruin and supercharged them through the nineties. Time has been kind to Atlantis, and the company’s first animated foray into science fiction remains one of their most ambitious. Featuring design work from comic book master artist Mike Mignola, the film (which is a nearly one-for-one rip-off of 1994’s Stargate) is a visual delight. An early incorporation of CG with the hand drawn, it succeeds in all the places that Strange World fumbles – the world is highly developed, the characters are well defined and have clear emotional arcs, and are inhabited by terrific performances including Jim “Earnest” Varney’s last. Chances are, unless you are a Disney completionist you might not have seen this film in 22 years, if at all. Do yourself a favor, and fix that right now.