I've noticed that several of the recent PIXAR and Walt Disney Animation films have been built around very pointed goals and messages. You had "Zootopia" providing some basic guidelines for talking about racism and sexism. You had "Finding Dory" providing an example of how it feels to be differently abled. "Turning Red" and "Encanto" offer guidance on various family dynamics and growing pains. And now we have "Strange World," which wants to provide an allegory for climate change, to tackle generational trauma, and to present Disney's first real, honest, we're-not-kidding-this-time, gay lead character.
Our heroes are three generations of the Clade family - legendary explorer Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid), his botanist son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), and sixteen year old Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). Jaeger and Searcher had a falling out during an expedition, leading to Jaeger disappearing and Searcher discovering a new plant based energy source called Pando. Many years later, when Pando is threatened, Searcher, his wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union), and Ethan become swept up in a Jules Verne style adventure, exploring a very strange, unknown part of their world - apparently where Jaeger has been all this time.
"Strange World" has been compared to past Disney adventure films like "Atlantis: the Lost Empire" and "Treasure Planet," and likewise I expect that this film will be remembered a lot more fondly once kids actually see it. The film features what is truly one of the strangest, most alien environments to ever feature in a Disney film, with creatures that seem to be made of glowing jelly blobs, or random arrangements of organic matter. Once you realize what some of them actually are, or are meant to represent, it's very clever, and all executed beautifully. The trouble is that the film feels like it was written by committee to hit all of these target objectives, and the result is a very bland, overly familiar film without much personality.
Let's take Ethan, for example. Good for Disney for finally committing to an LGBTQ lead, who is mixed race to boot, but they're clearly playing catch up to a younger generation that is about ten steps ahead of them, while also making Ethan the most basic and non-controversial sixteen year-old they possibly can. He doesn't want to become a worker on his dad's farm, has a crush on a guy named Diazo (Jonathan Melo), and plays a tabletop/collectible card game. Grandpa Jaeger is the stereotypical gung-ho self actualizer who steamrollers over everyone else's ideas and concerns. This leaves Searcher to do most of the emotional heavy lifting in the story, coming to the realization that his resentment over his dad's behavior is leading him to be overly paranoid and controlling of his own kid. And this is all well and good, but unfortunately not very interesting to watch.
The adventuring mostly picks up the slack, as the Clades have to learn the rules for survival in their new environment, and the Disney artists come up with some really fun concepts. Islands with feet! Swarms of flying magenta manta! Little orange guys who keep regrowing the plant life! Splat, a little blue sidekick critter, has rightly been called out for being an obvious candidate for mass merchandising, but he's also the best source of pure animation in the movie. There's no face, but just a glowy blue blob with a few pseudopods, which have to do all the gesturing and emoting. Splat ends up legitimately turning in a better performance than many of the human characters.
The film is designed to look like old pulp magazines and adventure comics, with characters whose features kept reminding me of European comics series like "Asterix the Gaul" and "The Adventures of Tintin." However, for an ensemble adventure film, it feels a little sparse. These movies usually come with half a dozen eccentric comedy relief characters, voiced by a bevy of celebrities, like Don Novello randomly showing up as the explosives guy in "Atlantis." I'm not sure whether it's a good or bad thing that "Strange World" doesn't do this. I suspect it's only noticeable because the filmmakers didn't come up with anything better.
Still, "Strange World" isn't a bad effort at all, and succeeds admirably at a lot of what it's trying to do. I'm optimistic that it will find its audience eventually, just like "Treasure Planet" and "The Emperor's New Groove," and other Disney bombs ultimately did.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment