Strange World

While Disney will always be seen as a juggernaut due to their prolific portfolio of IP and multimedia grasp over pop culture, it’s important to remember that they have suffered several severe failures, with entire years made up of commercial and critical bombs like 1970 –1988 (with films like The Aristocats, The Rescuers, Oliver & Company and The Black Cauldron) and 1999 – 2009 (with films like Fantasia 2000, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, and Chicken Little). While it was never enough to keep them down forever, it’s a familiar trend they’ve experienced throughout their lifespan, and the 2022 animated film, Strange World, made headlines for being a failure akin to something from these eras, and given it was released during a more recent dark period for the studio, it seemed like history was set to repeat again.

Set in the fictional world of Avalonia, Searcher Clade (voiced by Jake Gyllenhaal) is a farmer who helped discover a plant that provided a fuel source for the planet, and now enjoys his risk-free lifestyle with his wife, Meridian (voiced by Gabrielle Union) and his son, Ethan (voiced by Jaboukie Young-White). Adventuring literally lands at his doorstep however when an old family friend and president of Avalonia, Callisto (voiced by Lucy Liu) informs him that the power source (nicknamed Pando) is losing its energy, and they must travel into the centre of their planet in order to find the issue. Upon discovering a magical new environment within this sinkhole, Searcher comes across his famous adventurer father, Jaeger (voiced by Dennis Quaid) who went missing several years ago after venturing out on another quest. With the entire family involved in this mission, Searcher starts to fear that Ethan may take more after his grandfather than himself and tries everything he can to keep that from happening, which only pushes him away farther. The further they venture into this strange world, the more they discover what is causing the source of their power issues and realize that they may have to do something drastic in order to prevent a catastrophe.

Strange World was considered one of Disney’s worst box office bombs in a while and is now viewed as one of their most embarrassing and most unmemorable films ever conceived. Although it did fine critically, the lack of interest from audiences as well as only reaching $73.6 million against its $180 million budget (making it impossible for it to earn its money back) was a clear sign that something needed to be done if Disney wanted to get back on top.

Initially inspired from pulp magazine stories like Journey to the Centre of the Earth and King Kong, the warning signs were clear out the gate as the film had next to no advertising even close to its release date, and an original Disney animation having so little fanfare was jarring, hurt even more by the fact that anyone who did end up seeing it (which there were very few of) rarely enjoyed what they saw. The concept of recreating a style similar to those old-fashion junk-food type comic stories would be okay in theory, but even this idea seems flawed as they don’t match with how modern storytelling works. Most of these stories looked and felt like cheap fluff entertainment; the kind where the content was more exploitative and unconventional than family-friendly and relied on tropes and cliches that have been further explored recently and evolved into more engaging versions of what they once were. The film’s insistence on a basic retro run-of-the-mill narrative structure already makes it feel very uninspired and dated, but the more modern components that are dotted throughout the story and script feel jarringly out-of-place and the direction feels completely un-outlandish and docile, meaning it doesn’t even effectively emulate its inspiration and satisfies no one.

The directing by Don Hall and Qui Nguyen is extremely poor, giving little unique material within an environment and genre that should thrive on originality, and results in an awful screenplay (also provided by Hall and Nguyen) that feels underwritten and more focused on its message rather than its pacing, characters and story structure. The film tries to balance this sci-fi adventurous spirit with a personal drama between a segmented family unit, but the drama never feels genuine despite addressing relevant topics, the adventure component feels largely uninspired and lacking in spark or passion, and while its environmental messaging feels like something ripped right out of the 90s, the inclusion of more modern aspects like discussing generational trauma and a son trying to explore his homosexuality make this film feel like it’s in a limbo state. Other animated projects have been able to push the boundaries with more mature topics (even some from Disney), but any attempts in this movie just feel half-hearted and therefore, do a disservice to them.

The characters in an adventure story need to be compelling in order for the audience to want to spend time with them, and sadly this film provides characters that thankfully aren’t unlikeable or painful to be around, but are so phenomenally boring, uninteresting and lacking in any sense of personality or individuality, that they leave zero impression and will be forgotten about the moment the viewer turns the tv off. While this movie was praised for its increased diverse cast (with the son being the first openly gay main lead in a Disney film), representation shouldn’t come before basic character-building and relatability, and everyone in this main cast has nothing to offer outside of a singular character trait. Jake Gyllenhaal is very vanilla as the lead character, Gabrielle Union’s only defining trait is that she likes to fly things, Lucy Liu is weirdly miscast in the role of Callisto, whose passionate gun-ho adventurer qualities feel difficult for Lucy Liu to convey despite clearly showcasing cool qualities in other roles, Dennis Quaid as the father could’ve worked with more screen-time but just feels like the typical child-like father-figure we’ve seen in other animated films, and Jaboukie Young-White as the son probably could’ve functioned better if he was the lead rather than a second-tier deuteragonist, but he’s not allowed to do much outside of fulfill on his weak subplot regarding his relationship with his dad

There’s something strong that could come from the three generations of this family conflicting on their stances and how they find common ground over the course of the film, but because the characters themselves are pretty flat and the writing is so one-note in terms of exploring these topics, it only leads to predictable outcomes and cliched sequences. While the leads are boring and waste their potential, they’re still far better than any of the side characters, who seem to exist solely for one-off jokes or merchandising, There’s a three-legged dog that is so useless that the movie almost needs to go out of its way to make it feel like it contributed something, there’s an amorphous creature named Splat who’s animated well, has a fun formless design and is able to emote pretty nicely despite not having a face, but doesn’t stand out from other ‘’pet-like alien creatures’’ created previously, and the rest of the crew are pretty unbearable with how they take up screentime despite offering nothing of substance.

This movie was clearly solely interested in its visual style and design details as that’s where it feels like most of the attention and passion went towards, as to this movie’s credit, this strange world is a very visually pleasing and unique strange world. While a lot of modern sci-fi locations can feel very repetitive and like rip-offs of other stories and environments, this truly feels like a new kind of environment that hasn’t really been seen yet, feeling delightfully retro through the color scheme and abstract designs to feel like a call back to those pulp magazine but has distinct modern touches which help keep it fresh and unfamiliar. It accomplishes the task of creating a world you’d want to see more of as it gives just enough glimpses for people to get a taste, but not enough that it becomes stale too quickly. There are a lot of interesting, cool-looking sequences that take place in this new world, and it’s matched with great colors and abstractly designed creatures that feature traits of a recognisable animal to make them distinguishable.

However, while this world is great to look at, it also falls into a trap of only having investment in how it looks. Other sci-fi stories with landscapes of this type are helped out due to the inhabitants (whether humanoid or otherwise) giving it a unique feel that helps it stand out as a living world, but this movie doesn’t feature this kind of ecology, and since it expects the audience to invest in this location by the end (therefore removing the ability to just casually appreciate it from a distance), the problems start to emerge. The rest of the animation is sadly not as impressive as the environmental design, either feeling too similar to Disney’s more recent visual style or actively being weaker than the norm. The character designs all look a little weird due to the large facial features and appendages, and even the movement of all of them feels incredibly loose and rubbery like they’re made out of balloons. The music by Henry Jackson on occasion taps into that peppy, adventurous ‘’Indiana Jones’’ type sound that helps give this movie more of an identity and spirit, but it’s so rarely heard that it doesn’t have many chances to do so.

Even for how much this movie was destroyed, it could’ve been a simple case of lack of interest and failure in execution being piled onto a flawed but at least salvageable film, but sadly Strange World is much poorer than that, and doesn’t defend itself enough to make its financial failure feel undeserved. Even the failures in Disney’s past had a few gems within their sour moments, and Strange World feels like a rut that hasn’t been seen for a long time (and hopefully never again). Nothing is outright awful to sit through, and the movie is definitely visually interesting on a location basis (although it does sort of feel like ‘’Concept Art – The Movie” after a while), but there is absolutely no reason to actively search this movie out as it doesn’t offer anything new, fun, or even that inventive. Disney has been in worst spots than this, but Strange World feels like a window back to a period when they weren’t. It’s not strange to see why this film was dead on arrival.