REVIEW: Strange World

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 advances in computer animation over the last fifteen years are just doing a victory lap with this film. I’ll acknowledge I know little about the animation process in practice, but the movie certainly looked like it was a lot of fun to animate.

I would be remiss to not acknowledge that the film’s visuals outpace its storytelling a little more than is preferable. It’s not as simple as the characters not being as interesting as the world they’re inhabiting. This film actually employs some dynamics not often seen in mainstream animation and especially in children’s media. Our protagonist is a forty-year-old farmer with a wife and kid, and while the story of child Ethan gets its share of the narrative, the plot is fixed most firmly from the perspective of the father, Searcher, and the parental desire to leave your children with a happier life than you may have been supplied by your own parents.

The film’s emotional conflict runs down the Clade family line. Searcher resents that his father, the flamethrower-happy Jaeger, wanted him to grow into a certain kind of man, and Searcher’s entire parenting philosophy with Ethan revolves around him not pressuring his son into the life his father tried to force him into. Seasoned viewers may forecast that the natural way to create tension in this scenario is to tease the prospect of Searcher turning into the very parent he swore he’d never become.

That may be the natural storytelling impulse, but here the film buries the lede. Searcher is shown to be nothing but understanding toward Ethan from the very start. (The film even chooses to make Ethan's gay crush on the neighbor kid a non-issue in this family and this universe.) The film recognizes the need to create tension for this family, but where last year's Encanto felt ahead of the curve in understanding family dynamics, Disney settles on some fairly rote platitudes this time around.

There are moments when Strange World looks like it's going to become the studio's defining statement on fathers and sons, like Frozen for dads. The film is a little too unfocused to pull this off, but there are pockets of insight that develop on the peripheries. Either way, we're glad to have had the journey.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: You, Me & Tuscany

I've learned not to be ungrateful for movies like You, Me & Tuscany . It's the kind of picture that can be easily written off as predictable or derivative. And Kat Cairo's film definitely rides on some genre shorthand. Halle Bailey's Anna has very similar flaws to most rom-com heroines as this untethered 20-something trying to figure out how to stretch a check. And the story itself lands about where every one of these movies do. (Though, remind me, how does every Tom Cruise movie end?) After the screening concluded, one of the ladies sitting behind me even said something much like, "Yeah, that was a lot like While You Were Sleeping ." But she didn't sound smug in her assessment. Her pronouncement was more encoded with the excitement that comes with discovery--the realization that she had found something like a worthy successor. And as a fan of Sandra Bullock's second-best rom-com, I was inclined to agree with this la...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland , to point to another example. Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work,...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life alert, and maybe one day we’ll get the Wicked movie Universal has been promising us for ten years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like No Country for Old Men, which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns of old. Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion. Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth Krim...

Reveling in the Mixed Messages of Miss Congeniality

In book ten of Metamorphoses, Greek poet Ovid tells the tale of Pygmalion, a talented sculptor living in the height of ancient Greek society. According to the story, Pygmalion’s sculpting prowess was so impeccable that one of his pieces, a marble woman he christened Galatea, was said to be the lovelier than any woman of flesh and blood. Pygmalion was so taken by his creation that he brought her exotic gifts, kissed her marble cheeks, even prepared a luxurious bed for her. Pygmalion so pined to be loved by Galatea that he prayed to the goddess Aphrodite to allow Galatea to reciprocate his love and affection. Aphrodite was apparently in a good mood that day, so she granted Pygmalion’s wish, giving life to Galatea, whom he then wed. The story of Pygmalion is in essence the story of a man who creates his own idealized woman out of whole cloth (or more appropriately, marble), endowing her with all the traits that he finds appealing or alluring. The story also provides a m...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

The Case for Pre-Ragnarök Thor

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become such a fixture of pop culture that it’s difficult to imagine that the whole ordeal was actually a massive crapshoot. The biggest conceit of the MCU has been its ability to straddle a thousand different heroes—each with their own stories, casts, and universes—into one cohesive whole. It’s a balancing act like nothing that’s ever been attempted before in the hundred years of filmmaking. A lot of the brand’s success can be attributed to the way that each individual story adheres to the rules of its own specific universe. The Captain America movies serve a different purpose than the Spiderman movies, and all the movies in the Captain America trilogy have to feel like they belong together. There are, of course, questions posed by this model. In a network of films that all exist to set up other ...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole? However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just abominable. While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot...

The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement. And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre. Cinderella (1950) I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre . But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected. I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul ,...

REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..." Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger. This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man , telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a telev...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog