You’d think Disney Animation would have learned its’ lesson by now not to make adventure movies. The two times they released movies that were explicitly in the vein of the classic adventure genre, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, it resulted in a pair of the company’s biggest ever bombs. And while Strange World is likely not on track to usurp Treasure Planet as the company’s greatest financial failure, it did just suffer the studio’s worst opening weekend since Home on the Range eighteen years ago. As one who appreciates homages to Jules Verne and his compatriots, I applaud the effort –but general audiences made clear long ago they’re not into it.
At the same time, Disney has no one to really blame but themselves and their uncharacteristic inability to market this product, which got almost no traction in the months leading up to its’ release. Which strikes me as perhaps sabotage from a company more interested in pushing its’ Marvel product (it wouldn’t be the first time) –though Wakanda Forever even underperformed for the holiday weekend. Regardless of tedious box office metrics though, I don’t think Strange World amounts to much of a deprived gem.
Directed by Don Hall and Qui Nguyen from a script solely credited to Nguyen (which is rare for a Disney animated film), the movie introduces the isolated society of Avalonia, surrounded by dense mountains and jungles, and an esteemed family of explorer-adventurers, the Cades. Patriarch Jaeger (voiced by Dennis Quaid) disappears after he opts to keep trekking through the mountains at the behest of his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), content with the discovery of glowing green plants that could be harvested as a power source back home. After twenty-five years the Pando plants are starting to wither, and Searcher, now a farmer, embarks on an expedition to find their source and save their energy –accompanied by his own venturesome son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White).
Much like with Raya and the Last Dragon (which both Hall and Nguyen worked on too), there’s a curious character to the world set up by this movie, very actively trying to be some kind of cultural neutral zone, yet still ultimately coming down to a Euro-centric aesthetic -any culture that prioritizes exploration can’t get away from that. Still there’s a niftiness to its’ pseudo-modern society. And the bulk of the movie taking place in a deep underground world allows for plenty indulgence in creativity. Fully in the spirit of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, it is the depths below the mountains where the adventure very quickly leads. There amidst pink skies and pillowy landscapes, everything seems to be a life form of some kind; but with no defining features, every creature being invertebrate, faceless, fungal -in a manner that kind of gives the game away about the nature of this lost world. But it is nice to behold, distinct from any Disney environment preceding it, and one where some truly original storytelling or animation could take place.
That is not what happens though as Strange World, for its’ visual creative spark, remains mostly fixated on a lesser incarnation of the same topic Disney has been broaching for a while now: generational dysfunction. This is a movie all about the pressures fathers put on sons to follow in their footsteps, and the sons’ desires to go their own way instead. It plays across the three generations of Cades, but apart from an interesting observation that Searcher, for all his fears about Ethan turning into Jaeger, has himself become his father as pertaining to his stringent expectations, there’s not much there of interest or ingenuity. The conflicts are highly formulaic, the relationships don’t feel real –much as they might pay lip-service to the idea of psychological scars of abandonment or neglect. There’s no sense of emotional authenticity built up -when Jaeger reappears in the strange world his reunion with his son is hollow and undercut by the movies’ mostly tepid sense of humour (a lot of hack Disney-isms to put it shortly). No opportunity presents itself for them to reckon with that relationship, instead understanding simply comes in pithy acknowledgement of their different goals and outlooks on life. Ethan is meant to be the supposedly ideal medium of his father and grandfather, quite explicitly illustrated through a strategy game in which he pursues harmony. This notion too fails to materialize into anything of inspiration –his neutral philosophy just as dull and toothless as his progenitors.
Ethan is actually a decently thought-out character, and of the dozen or so “first gay characters” for Disney, he is perhaps the only meaningful one, with an open acknowledged crush on another boy as a significant beat. He is also explicitly biracial, which is unique for Disney. But any personality just becomes absorbed in his central function and a few general teenager tropes. That’s sadly the case of a lot of this cast. Though all but one crewmember survive the initial plummet into the underground world, precious little is done with any of them barring the central family. Though they’re nowhere as interesting or diverse as say the cast of Atlantis, there is potential there to represent a more rounded community -instead of consigning them to a mere backdrop as their society already is. The mission leader voiced by Lucy Liu is largely a plot device and even Searcher’s wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) is underdeveloped. Meanwhile Jaeger and Searcher themselves remain largely archetypal protagonists, given some life via the voice talent and details of the animation -but not enough.
There is one other thing going on in the movie of note, and that is its’ laboured but somewhat messy climate change metaphor. The whole purpose of the mission is of course to save a natural resource for Avalonia that seems to be vanishing. Plenty is made of the virtues of farming and cultivating a balanced ecosystem. A last act reveal though, which re-contextualizes the world and this message to a very thematically blunt degree, has the effect of complicating the allegory. It’s certainly a curious notion the movie is getting at here, but it muddies the core idea by requiring an abandonment of the initial intent -which was written with a far more accessible and naturalistically sound premise. Instead the movie ends with what seems to be a refutation of green energy -definitely a theme that sits well for Disney.
Nonetheless, Strange World was seemingly buried by the company I suspect not for reasons of quality as much as subject. I’m frankly astonished they didn’t shove it to Disney+, the Disney Feature Animation label probably the only thing ensuring its’ theatrical distribution. Given the attempt to suppress it, I wish I could say it was a better movie than it is. But for its’ base intrepid interests it doesn’t have a lot of substance -and the Disney creative machine hurts the characters and tone too much. I’ll always advocate for classically inspired adventure stories, if for no other reason than a personal love for them from when I was a kid. However Strange World is just another title to add to the list of Disney’s failed experiments in this realm -both creatively and financially. I wouldn’t blame them for never touching the genre again.
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