Strange World

What comes first: the sto­ry or the metaphor? Should a writer invent char­ac­ters and sce­nario, then allow view­ers to extract wider mean­ings and secret sub­texts from the mate­r­i­al? Or should the mean­ing come first, and the plot is some­thing that is retroac­tive­ly fit­ted around it?

For his new Dis­ney ani­ma­tion Strange World, it appears that Don Hall (fol­low­ing up Moana and Raya and the Last Drag­on) and his writer Qui Nguyen have opt­ed for the lat­ter, as this rip­ping yarn about sub­ter­ranean explo­ration on an Earth-like plan­et goes extreme­ly heavy on the envi­ron­men­tal mes­sag­ing at the expense of a dra­mat­i­cal­ly cred­i­ble storyline.

Alpha papa Jaeger Clade (Den­nis Quaid) is a rois­ter­ing glo­be­trot­ter who is adamant to tra­verse the snowy peaks that sur­round the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-prim­i­tive town­ship of Aval­o­nia. He brings with him his gawky, acci­dent-prone son, Searcher (Jake Gyl­len­haal), who’s more inter­est­ed in perus­ing the landscape’s strange flo­ra and fauna.

One day, the crew hap­pen across an odd plant that resem­bles a bush of Brus­sels sprouts. Except these sprouts (known as Pan­do) don’t give you gas – they’re charged with elec­tric­i­ty. Searcher sees a rev­o­lu­tion­ary renew­able ener­gy source and a way to drag Aval­o­nia out of the dark ages, while Jaeger is des­per­ate to car­ry on and see what’s over the hori­zon. And so after a fiery argu­ment, the pair part ways.

Twen­ty-five years lat­er, and Searcher is Avalonia’s pre­mière Pan­do farmer along with his avi­a­trix wife, Merid­i­an (Gabrielle Union), and 16-year-old son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), who in both occu­pa­tion and sex­u­al pref­er­ence is very much not look­ing to fol­low in the foot­steps of his old man. On the back of their dis­cov­ery, the Clades have become local heroes, memo­ri­alised in bronze and thought of as scions of inno­va­tion. Yet some­thing is hap­pen­ing to the Pan­do. It’s rot­ting from its cen­tralised root and the elec­tri­cal charge is no longer hold­ing. So Searcher and fam­i­ly are packed off into an air­ship with town leader Cal­lis­to (Lucy Liu) and rag-tag crew to save this invalu­able resource.

Hall has spo­ken of his love of 1950s adven­ture seri­als, and the gim­crack­ing com­ic book der­ring do as seen in ear­ly Boy’s Own tales are very much a tonal and aes­thet­ic influ­ence in Strange World. In fact, it wouldn’t be sur­pris­ing to dis­cov­er that Hall had been bon­ing up on his Duck Tales or Res­cue Rangers ahead of putting this one togeth­er. This voy­age into the unknown takes our heroes to an alien ter­rain pop­u­lat­ed by sen­tient tubules, glob­ules and ten­ta­cles, all of which are sin­gle-mind­ed­ly aggres­sive towards any out­side invaders.

As an eco­log­i­cal fable about humanity’s masochis­tic rela­tion­ship with fos­sil fuels, Strange World is very old hat. Stu­dio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyaza­ki told a sim­i­lar, supe­ri­or tale over 30 years ago with his Lapu­ta: Cas­tle in the Sky, and there have been many decent copy­cat films in the interim.

As such, there’s the nag­ging feel­ing that this one is very con­tent to rake old ground rather than search for a new way to express these impor­tant, if rather boil­er­plate ideas. It’s laud­able that these lessons are being passed on to a new gen­er­a­tion, but it’s hard­ly new or excit­ing ter­rain for sto­ry­telling. With­out giv­ing any­thing away, the end of the film offers a far more intrigu­ing start­ing point that the more obvi­ous arc we have here.

What is rev­o­lu­tion­ary, how­ev­er, is that the film con­tains Dis­ney ani­ma­tions first mixed-race gay char­ac­ter in Ethan, and he is pre­sent­ed and devel­oped in a way that isn’t just a com­plete­ly super­fi­cial and con­se­quence-free nod to his sex­u­al­i­ty (hel­lo MCU!). Strange World’s oth­er key theme is one of accep­tance and under­stand­ing when it comes to the choic­es of loved ones, whether a father wants to aban­don his fam­i­ly due to his mono­ma­ni­a­cal thirst for adven­ture, or a son who not only doesn’t want to inher­it the fam­i­ly busi­ness, but wants to embrace a dif­fer­ent fam­i­ly dynam­ic alto­geth­er. This is the first time a Dis­ney fam­i­ly title such as this has real­ly put its mon­ey where its mouth is in terms of bold, mod­ern, pro­gres­sive depic­tions of fam­i­ly, and here’s hop­ing that it whips up a per­for­ma­tive moral fren­zy with all the wrong people.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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