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

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