Strange World

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

Over the years, Disney’s family films have been keeping up with the changing trends of modern society, what is accepted, prevalent, and important for its youngers to understand, as they grow up to become members of it. It’s a noble cause that Disney is following: educating the young through an accessible medium, making the confusing themes of sexuality, identity, mental health, equality, multiculturalism, the generational divide less so. The studio’s latest film, Strange World, adds the concept of disease, the inner workings of the body, and symbiosis to the gloopy, intangible mix.

The Clades are a legendary family of adventurers. Well, they were until Searcher’s father went missing after having a disagreement with him during an expedition. Searcher returned home with a new-found resource and changed the world for the better. But now that resource is becoming diseased and it falls to Searcher and his family to find the cause and stop it. Not happy at having to relive his adventuring days, things get worse for Searcher when they crash land in a strange new world. But that’s not all, his dad’s there too.

A really obvious metaphor for Covid, Strange World explores the internal architecture of the body and teaches its younger audience how it works by turning it into a whole new world. The animation is very trippy and stunning, but this is where the film’s successes end.

They say if something’s not broken don’t fix it, and there is absolutely sense in that. However, while a clockwork routine can often be something to be appreciated, sometimes we long for a little bit of chaos or, at least, surprise. The structure of voice-over narrated exposition at the beginning, blended with the opening scene of drama crucial to the protagonist’s backstory made the film very predictable. No joke, within the first ten minutes, partner and I knew that the father would come back and that a whole reunion/reconciliation arc was going to happen, blah blah blah. It has to be said that slightly entertaining characters and visually cool, imagined worlds cannot carry a film when the story is old and arthritic. It’s hard to get enveloped and excited in a film when you can foresee what’s going to happen well before even the first hint is dropped.

Image credit: Collider.com

Honestly, this doesn’t make the character journeys any less important or moving, but without the promise of a treat, what’s the point in being on your best behaviour? I definitely appreciated the film’s representation of other cultures and inclusion of alternate sexualities, but even this was not enough to keep my attention from wandering.

Strange World is definitely a good one for the kids. There is a little something for everyone, so it serves as a fun family movie of an afternoon, but at the end of the day, I’m waiting for Walt Disney Studios to bring us something really new and surprising.

Director: Don Hall & Qui Nguyen, 2022

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu, Karan Soni, Abraham Benrubi, Jonathan Melo,  Nik Dodani, Francesca Reale, & Alan Tudyk