Major studios and companies make expensive, stupid blunders all the time, and yet I can still find myself astonished when confronted with such an error. 2022's Strange World is a good example. It comes at a time when most major studios seem to be making big, disastrous mistakes, and Disney in particular has been squandering its good reputation with a string of stupid Disney+ content, with Andor standing alone as a diamond in the rough. But Strange World is baffling also because it hearkens back to Disney Animation Studios' early 2000s flirtation with science fiction, a series of films that performed badly at the box office, a steep drop from the '90s renaissance, conveniently serving to demarcate the eras. In fact, Strange World is so similar to Atlantis: The Lost Empire it's nearly a remake. I guess it's a sign of how poorly Atlantis is remembered that Strange World was made at all.
Like Atlantis, Strange World is a Journey to the Centre of the Earth pastiche that ends with a heavy-handed environmentalist message. It also borrows a vintage pulp aesthetic, as Atlantis did. But while Atlantis had attractive characters and great designs by Mike Mignola, Strange World belongs to a trend in modern American media that deliberately avoids making characters physically appealing.
None of the character designs are really good but the biggest crime is Ethan Clade (Jaboukie Young-White). As Disney Animation's first openly gay character, you'd think they'd have gone out of their way to make this character appealing. Instead, he looks like Ned Beatty, isn't funny, and his problems aren't interesting. We learn at the beginning of the film that he has a crush on a guy in his school but this guy never becomes a proper character in the film. Mostly the central conflict is between Ethan and his father, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), and between Searcher and his father, Jaeger, played by Dennis Quaid, who seems to be doing a Kurt Russell impression.
I'd bet you anything the role was written for Kurt Russell but Russell couldn't or wouldn't do it. There are signs the story was meant to be making reference to John Ford's The Searchers, hinted at in the names of the characters Ethan and Searcher as well as in an inclusion at the end of the famous, often imitated, "Searchers Shot".
The Searchers starred John Wayne. Kurt Russell has memorably parodied or paid homage to Wayne in movies numerous times. So the casting would have made sense. But I don't know what Strange World thinks it's saying about The Searchers. Jaeger goes missing at the beginning of the film in a tragic accident but it's not like Ethan and Searcher go "searching" for him. They assume he's dead and it's only when the Pando, this film's metaphorical fossil fuel, starts to get a strange disease that an expedition is launched to find the cause and, perhaps, a better source of Pando. The name recalls Pandora, appropriate since this film also seems to crib a bit from James Cameron's Avatar. Not as egregiously as Raya and the Last Dragon cribbed from Avatar: The Last Airbender, though. Both movies, incidentally, were written by Qui Nguyen. Disney's choice to hire Nguyen again after Raya was unsuccessful might not be so mysterious when you consider Strange World was likely in production before Raya hit theatres. If Disney continues to hire Nguyen after this, we can take it as a symptom of madness.
I didn't hate Raya, as you might recall, and some of the pulp adventure moments I liked in that film had not dissimilar moments here. I also really liked the creature designs in Strange World which mainly consisted of kinds of gelatinous, mollusc dinosaurs.
But, even though the underlying conflicts in Raya made no sense, at least the main character was pretty. Strange World's characters just come up empty on all counts. The anxiety over becoming one's father versus a father's desire for his son to follow in his footsteps is a nice enough prompt. But in execution, Strange World has too much nonsense. Ethan's unwavering pacifism doesn't make sense, even when the movie has nonsensical things occur to support it. Searcher's issues with his father are never adequately developed. The environmental message is largely responsible for the last act of the film dissolving into a series of forced plot points so the moments when tension is supposed to be at the highest it's at its lowest. The movie is altogether a slog to get through and requires active effort on the viewer's part to find its meagre positive qualities.
Strange World is on Disney+.
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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
Zootopia
Moana
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Frozen II
Raya and the Last Dragon
Encanto
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