In Strange World, the world may be very strange, but those who inhabit it are some of the most realistic and well-rounded characters Walt Disney Animation Studios has ever introduced. Ergo, it’s the characters like the environment that make this Journey to the Center of the Earth-style adventure movie vibrant, colorful, and diverse in the best ways. The people and places they explore may be fascinating, however, and the relatively unimaginative story puts this groovy toon in second tier status – a notch below Don Hall’s “Big Hero 6” – rather than breaking the bank of the Disney classics.
“Strange World” focuses on a civilization called Avallonia, which is surrounded by an “impassable ring of mountains”. A sudden (and somewhat inexplicable) lack of resources prompts three generations of the daring Clade family to face the unknown. Swarthy, macho Granddad Jaeger (voiced by Dennis Quaid) tries to make his way straight through the mighty mountains with his more cautious son, the Scholar (Jake Gyllenhaal). A quarter-century after that mission went south, Searcher — this time underground — with his teenage son, Ethan (Jaboukie Young- White), sets out along for the ride.
Down in the Strange World, they discover a stunning ecosystem, filled with pink gum trees and floating streams of sashimi-shaped creatures. It’s a dazzling new environment – filled with exotic flora and fauna that Dr. Seuss enjoys in mismatched shapes and colors – that takes advantage of the fact that we don’t know if we’re in inner space, outer space, or somewhere else entirely. . Production designer Mehrdad Esfandi meets the ever-surprising “forbidden planet” — a “Fantastic Journey” aesthetic that keeps us guessing, testing our prejudices about organisms we don’t recognize.
The same goes for the Avalon characters, who come in a refreshing array of shapes, colors, and configurations, from the three-legged pet dog Legend to Ethan’s biracial family. Avalonia itself looks a lot like a Swiss farming community, though it’s been given a cool steampunk upgrade shortly after Searcher discovers a glowing factory he calls a “pando” during the film’s prologue – rendered in an engaging visual style treated with the classic Ben-Day movie Pulp flair early comic.
Mission accomplished, as far as Searcher is concerned: Pando is a renewable energy source — literally, “green energy” — and what could be better than that? Better suited to farming than to rough it up like his father, Searcher keeps the adventure-averse family man busy for the next 25 years—until such time as the pando crop begins to fail and Avalonia boss Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu) recruits them for an outing into the realm of a stranger. Gyllenhaal is great at playing the overprotective father who’s also progressive-minded enough to realize he doesn’t want to be the overbearing control freak his father was. When the Searcher orders Ethan to stay home, it is not surprising that the boy disobeys him, straying away in the pando-powered airship as it takes off to save the precious plant that Avalonia depends on.
Once they reach the alien world, Ethan’s personality proves to be an asset, as these humanoid characters encounter species the likes of which no one has ever seen before: Day-Glo pterodactyls, floating pink pancakes and land masses that walk on giant elephant legs. While Abi is wary, Ethan grows more trusting of the unfamiliar lifeforms they encounter, adopting a blue amoeba-like blob he calls “Splat”. It’s a testament to the animators that this creature — which stretches like a toy sticky hand and looks like a kazuo — still manages to be adorable, even without the googly eyes (or anything that remotely resembles a face). And guess who they have to find there but Searcher’s lost pop, which opens up all kinds of daddy issues.
Clearly drawn in the spirit of Jules Verne and HG Wells, writer (and co-director) Qui Nguyen focuses on the father-son dynamics between these characters. There are environmental themes, too, which obviously make for a great turn-on in the third act, but the film’s organic message — instructive without being preachy — comes down to this: Teach your kids well…and you might end up learning from them in the end. Heck, Graham Nash’s folk-rock classic would have made a great hit had the filmmakers not ordered a John Williams-style orchestral score from composer Henry Jackman (who delivers the wacky family anthem “They’re the Clydes!” instead).
Looking back through Disney’s toon catalog, you’ll find the studio alternated more or less between boy- or girl-centric movies, with “Treasure Planet” on one side and most princess movies on the other. “Strange World” may focus on helping its men work through their issues, but it offers no shortage of strong female role models – like Clade matriarch Meridian (Gabrielle Union) – or people of color. In fact, this may be the first Disney movie (not including “The Jungle Book” or “Zootopia”) to show characters from diverse backgrounds coexisting as they do in real life.
It was beginning to feel like Disney had woken up and realized that families, groups of friends, and the larger community around them weren’t monolithic, and that the studio was out of touch when confined into separate cultural bubbles. This is not so much against Mulan, Moana, or Encanto – each of which made pioneering strides toward broadening Disney’s horizons – so much as an enthusiastic endorsement of presenting a world in which diverse identities mingle more than they collide.
By far the most overdue of these innovations is the way Ethan takes a liking to a boy named Diazo (Jonathan Melo)…and everyone has fun with it. The only drama the subplot generates is whether Ethan will find the nerve to tell Diazo how he feels – though it’s very clear that Diazo already knows and shares Ethan’s feelings. Certainly, some countries would lose their minds over the presence of a gay character in a Disney movie, which makes it even braver that producer Roy Conley considered it time to expand the studio’s “Someday My Prince Will Come” idea of romance. It’s normal for some kids to feel the way Ethan feels, just as it’s normal for his mom to also be a pilot. Those who think otherwise are the ones who live in a strange world.
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