Director Don Hall has acknowledged pulp adventures as the main source of inspiration for Walt Disney Animation's newest film, Strange World , but the landscape of his film feels so striking and unique that it seems to have sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus without any earthly influences. Viewers of this film might have the rare experience of feeling like they’re watching something entirely original. Though the film does eventually feel obliged to explain what exactly is going on with this Strange World, the film establishes early on that we can never really anticipate what’s going to happen with this otherworldly terrarium. This is most clear in the designs of the various flora and fauna in this universe (it’s not always clear where one ends and the other begins) which land in that narrow overlap between bizarre and endearing. The final rendering itself is wonderfully tactile. You want to hug everything onscreen, even as it's trying to digest our heroes. All the ad...
“But isn’t it time we stopped accepting in film criticism an anti-emotional, phony rationalism which we know to be not just harmful, but absurd, in any other context? Isn’t it time we plucked up our courage and allowed our hearts as well as our heads to go the pictures?” Raymond Durgnat (Films and Feelings) 1971