Strange World

[James]

"good enough" should never really be good enough

Love that. And it should be especially true for Disney's canon films. Unfortunately it feels like story is no longer what motivates their filmmakers these days.

[Ben]

Thanks. It’s funny, but often throughout this, in terms of dialogue and character dynamics, I really felt Disney Animation now needs a whole new bunch of filmmakers to shake things up. Or, at least, less exec meddling or working to templates an$ what they *think* is cool or what an audience "wants". The last few films have been very cookie-cutter with their personalities, especially.

[Daniel]

What if Strange World were 8-bit/16-bit:



So awesome. The look, music, sound effects. Really feels authentic.

[Ben]

Love the banding on the logo.

[EricJ]

I wanted to weigh in on this (after finishing off my last-chance-before-January Netflix, Amazon, and TubiTV movies) with my opinions, but darn:
As usual, Doug Walker had to go and nail them all FIRST!


I do not exaggerate when I say I thought I knew where this movie was headed in the first five minutes with the "Dad's a hero, Junior's a botanist!" song--And when we find out his son Lucio...er, Ethan wants to be an explorer, not a farmer, I was positive I knew where this movie was headed.
If the movie had been about Ethan, I could see it being sort of imaginative, but it seems to be more about grown-up Searcher as the main character, which places it squarely in the realm of "Hook Syndrome": Ie., do kids really want to see stories of parent guilt or unresolved grownup daddy-issues as much as late 20s/early 30-something screenwriters want to write them?
(Any time a character grows up feeling like his dad was too domineering on his life, I immediately get old traumas from Tim Burton's vicarious tantrum at the beginning of "Big Fish"....Eww, ick, [vampire-cross fingers], back, back!!)

And yes, I was getting heavy Atlantis vibes from this, but not in the good way:
More in the sense of how we never really know anything about the strange country except that things attack them, and how we never really know anything about the supporting-character crew except that they're either ethnic tropes (like Mom and Callisto) or unappealingly nutty and unlikable (like Furry Grandpa).
Even the lovable three-legged Sprocket dog just reminded me of "Have we seen a non-injured pet in movies since 1998?"

My old Treasure Planet demons always make me stick up and defend movies that get picked on for a non-starter box-office, but yeah, if anyone else had seen this in theaters, it still wouldn't have been there long.

[droosan]

I watched Strange World on Disney+ this evening, and enjoyed it well enough .. though, I found myself to be a few steps ahead of the plot, at pretty much all times.

It did very much feel as though Disney put Moana, Atlantis, Up and even bits of The Croods and other films in a blender, and pressed 'purée'.

As it's made clear even from the opening sequence that this is not a tale set on 'our' world, I wonder what the rationale was for making the protagonists humans..? Since Disney leaned so hard into sci-fi on all other fronts, perhaps this story might've been better told with a cast of alien creatures ..

To the 'controversies' complained about above (and elsewhere online), I can only say:

.. but as that comes from a longtime L.A./SoCal resident, I'll be easily ignored.

[EricJ]

As it's made clear even from the opening sequence that this is not a tale set on 'our' world, I wonder what the rationale was for making the protagonists humans..? Since Disney leaned so hard into sci-fi on all other fronts, perhaps this story might've been better told with a cast of alien creatures ..

Good point, but we'd be too used to seeing a family of interracially diverse aliens, it wouldn't be "progressive" enough.

(And then there'd be the whole "Delgo" thing.)

[droosan]

Inside Out, Onward & Elemental have non-human casts that tick the 'diverse appearances' box without the Delgo-esque 'uncanny valley' effect. Illumination's The Grinch also managed this quite well.

Or -- perhaps Strange World could've given some indication that the human inhabitants of Avalonia are descendants of an expedition from Earth who'd become trapped there long ago, and developed their own far-flung civilization over the centuries since (I guess there's nothing in the movie that refutes this, as a possibility).

[Farerb]

‘Strange World’ filmmakers talk diversity, box office: “It will mean a lot to a lot of people in the future”

Strange World may be set in a weird land populated by bizarre creatures, but the Walt Disney Animation Studios comedy adventure has its roots firmly planted in the real world.

When he was first toying with ideas for his next project, director Don Hall was, he recalls, “thinking about what kind of world my kids are going to inherit environmentally, and what kind of world I inherited from my dad, who’s a farmer in Iowa”.

Hall, a Disney veteran whose previous projects include Oscar winner Big Hero 6, which he directed with Chris Williams, adds: “I wanted to tell an environmental story, but because it was inspired by my kids and my dad, the father-son element was already baked in. And it felt like a good emotional lens to tell this story, about the environment but also about fathers and sons, without it being preachy.”

To bring the themes together, Hall and writer/co-director Qui Nguyen came up with the story of a family of explorers from the isolated country of Avalonia, whose universal source of power — a plant called ‘pando’ — is under threat.

To save pando, explorer-turned-farmer Searcher Clade (voiced for the film by Jake Gyllenhaal), his teen son (Jaboukie Young-White) and his life partner (Gabrielle Union) set off by airship into an uncharted subterranean region — where they encounter treacherous creatures as well as Searcher’s long-lost adventurer dad (Dennis Quaid).

Hall and Nguyen found inspiration for the story in the vintage sci-fi of Jules Verne and HG Wells, adventure classics such as King Kong, French and Belgian comics, and pulp adventure magazines from the 1930s and 1940s.

But they also gave the story a contemporary diversity, making Searcher and his partner an inter­racial couple and creating, in Searcher’s son Ethan, what is believed to be the first openly gay teen character in a Disney animation feature.

Though the film was never intended, in Hall’s words, “to be a coming out story”, the diversity plays a significant role, according to Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American playwright whose first feature experience was as writer of Disney Animation’s Raya And The Last Dragon.

“The environment affects us all, it doesn’t matter what race we are, our sexuality, or anything like that,” Nguyen points out. “It was important that the world of Avalonia reflected the world we actually live in. The story wasn’t about diversity and inclusion, but the diversity and inclusion were integral to the metaphor that it is our world that is in danger, not just this made-up one.”

https://www.screendaily.com/features/st ... 85.article

[GeffreyDrogon]

And pandering to the LGBTQ+ "fanbase" is what killed that film's box office chances.

[Randall]

Phooey. No one really cares about that. The film had no promotion.

[EricJ]

And it's still only one scene, that could be chopped out for the Chinese release.

[GeffreyDrogon]

There is no money in pandering to the LGBTQ+ community, from what movies like Lightyear, Strange World, and Bros have shown.

If Disney really cared about gays, it should've made a Zootopia+ short about those two gay pronghorns no one cares about.

[droosan]

One of the primary clues that this movie isn't set within 'our' world is the fact that there was absolutely no stigma attached to Ethan's crush.

His mother and father are fully supportive .. even his grandfather (whom he'd never met) didn't bat an eyelash ..

.. and his peers clearly only think it's adorable.

What a 'strange world', indeed.

[Randall]

Some might say pandering, some might say reflecting reality. Either way, those films had way more issues than a brief acknowledgement of gay-ness.