So, Thanksgiving weekend premiered, among other things, a new animated Disney movie. I’d seen trailers for Strange World. It looked kinda cool to me, personally. But I knew I was busy that weekend and only really had time to head out to the local multiplex once, maybe twice at most despite multiple days off. I figured the Disney flick would be crowded, and even post-COVID, I am still not all that comfortable with crowds. Then the strangest thing happened: the movie apparently flopped. Why? I have no idea and won’t pretend to. I suspect there will be some folks who will just claim the movie was too “woke” or something, and I can see why people who have issues with anything “woke” might claim that, but maybe it just didn’t interest people since it lacked a princess or something.
Regardless, I opted to check it out.
The small country of Avalonia is surrounded by impassable mountains. Brave explorer Jaeger Clade (voice of Dennis Quaid) makes it his mission to find what’s on the other side. He even trains his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) to follow in his footsteps. However, Searcher isn’t interested. He’s a bit clumsy and easily spooked, and when Searcher finds a mysterious plant full of some sort of energy, he figures that might be a bigger discovery than what’s on the other side of the mountains. Jaeger won’t hear of it and goes off by himself, seemingly never to return.Twenty-five years later, Searcher is a successful farmer, having used the plant, called “Pando,” to power a wide range of devices including flying machines all over Avalonia. He runs the farm happily with his wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) and teenage son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). They even have a three-legged dog, Legend.
But the Pando can’t seem to hold a charge like it used to, and the plants are dying of some mystery blight. You know, like something out of Nolan’s Interstellar. However, President of Avalonia Calisto (Lucy Liu), a former companion of both Jaeger and Searcher, comes to Searcher to find the literal root cause since it turns out Pando is one large plant with a root system that goes deep underground. Search reluctantly agrees and his whole family manages to tag along to what turns out to be a mysterious and weird world under the surface, a place full of odd creatures that behave in an odd manner…plus the long lost Jaeger. He’s still looking for the other side of the mountain while Searcher just wants to cure the Pando. Plus, Ethan has his own ideas of what to do in a situation like this that might be a cross between both his father and grandfather. What really is going on, and can the Clade men band together long enough to save the day?
Well, I remember seeing the trailers and thinking the “Strange World” was another planet. It isn’t. It’s underground. So, neat trick there. And while I can see why some people might think this movie is too “woke,” I don’t think that’s the problem here. Quite frankly, the “woke” aspects didn’t bother me any. If anything, this is just a really unconventional Disney movie. It’s not a musical–there is one song, a rather rousing anthem for Jaeger Clade played over an opening scene explaining who he is–and there’s no princess. It’s not based on a fairy tale, and unlike Moana or Raya and the Last Dragon, it doesn’t have a young protagonist finding inner strength to realize that violence may not solve the problem mostly because it’s not really clear which character here is the main protagonist. Likewise, it isn’t a celebration of a culture that may not get much attention in traditional American movies like Moana or Encanto. It could be a rousing adventure movie, but it never quite gets there.
“Never quite getting there” might be a good way to describe this movie. The visuals are neat, but they made me think they looked like something specific, and I wasn’t very wrong when I got to the end of the movie. The big problem is the Clades. They aren’t really all that interesting individually, and I can chalk a lot of that up to casting. Quaid is fine, but Gyllenhaal’s voice isn’t exactly the ideal choice for an animated hero. A more, shall we say, animated voice from a regular voice actor might have been better, but I didn’t think the Clades were any better than a bunch of stock characters. Given the studio’s output in recent years, even with the neat visuals, this was just rather rote. I wouldn’t say it was bad or anything, but it certainly wasn’t all that interesting.
Grade: C+
0 Comments