‘Strange World’ Takes a Surreal Family Journey With an Environmental Message

Alci Rengifo

Disney’s “Strange World” pulls off the feat of saying all it wants to get across through its visuals. The plot is standard family movie material, now updated with contemporary, progressive sensibilities. You can almost turn off the sound and just follow the story while drinking in what the studio’s animators envision. It’s becoming a common practice now for Disney to churn out these smaller entertainments that are almost addendums to the bigger, flashier projects by key partners Marvel and Pixar. A movie like this one has the feel of the animation team being allowed to indulge a bit now that the major prestige titles are out of the way. The result is a slightly clunky but enjoyable time, with a decent message to top it off.

“Strange World” combines recognizable Disney character types with fresh personalities right out of your suburban neighborhood. First, we get macho explorer Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid), who looks like Paul Bunyan on steroids. For years Jaeger has tried to cross the seemingly impassable mountains that surround his home civilization, Avalonia. During one attempt his son, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), isn’t enthusiastic about the idea. Jaeger goes missing. Years later a fully grown Searcher runs his own farm where he grows a renewable energy source called Pando, makes avocado toast for his teenage son, Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), and is married to Meridian (Gabrielle Union). But just as the Pando crops start to fail, Searcher receives a surprise visit from Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu), president of Avalonia and former colleague of Jaeger’s. She needs Searcher to join an expedition into “Strange World,” meaning the interior or core of the land they inhabit, to save the Pando plant. 

“Strange World” cheerfully borrows from obvious sources like “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” with trippy visuals similar to the inner core journey of last year’s “Godzilla vs. Kong.” It’s the texture of the movie that truly pulls you in. The writing by co-directors Qui Nguyen and Don Hall, the duo behind the delightful “Raya and the Last Dragon,” is commendable for how it continues Disney’s unabashed exploration of inclusivity. Unlike the usual Disney hero, Searcher is a modern parent who lacks the alpha male attitude of his dad. He’s designed like a West L.A. resident, making avocado toast, married to a strong Black woman and being supportive of Ethan, who is gay, when he has a crush on another teen. There’s room for complexity in how Searcher then has to reconnect with his more rugged side when facing the unknown in Strange World. But when the group eventually bumps into Jaeger, now grayed but still a full survivalist, the drama becomes more about parent-offspring expectations than misogyny. Jaeger is also quite the accepting grandfather, also prone to giving Ethan dating advice. Here the directors refreshingly avoid recycling the classic Disney love story clichés. Ethan just has a crush. It’s a fact of life and nothing more. The same is also true for how the script intelligently imagines characters of different ethnic makeup living together like human beings, without the need to overly label each other. 

Yet much of “Strange World” isn’t necessarily breaking the mold in terms of story structure. It’s an animated movie in a more breezily enjoyable tradition. Strange World as a place is a psychedelic landscape of flying red fish-like creatures, large plants, gooey and cute creatures that become attached to the heroes. The main blob character, lovingly called “Splat,” is no doubt designed to also become a coveted toy at your local Disney Store. But the studio knows what it is doing and such creations are always quirky to follow. The same goes for the action which delivers the required close calls, chases and stunner revelations. As a narrative it works because there is meaning behind the colorful ride. Nguyen and Hall use the needed twist at the end to make a statement about the environment, and how our world should be treated as something that lives, as opposed to merely a chunk of space rock we inhabit. The final shot is a wonderful metaphor for this idea, done simply even though we are tempted to chuckle slightly at Avalonia’s origins. “Strange World” is designed to be fun, impressively diverse and say something that adults should heed as urgently as the intended, younger audience.

“Strange World” releases Nov. 23 in theaters nationwide.