Disney Animation has mostly been on a heater since Wreck-It-Ralph, catching up to the great Pixar with wonderful stories and characters like Moana, Anna, Elsa, and Bruno, giving us cultural history from different places Disney normally made movies from. I guess feeling a bit nostalgic, Strange Land feels like a mid 2000s Disney movie. It’s not bad per se, but it feels a bit lazy and uninspired. I’m guessing like everyone else post pandemic, Disney just took a giant vacation to travel instead of work, resulting in this semi-stop gap of a movie.
Avalonia is a small farming town with no real technology, surrounded by insurmountable mountains. Struggling to survive, the Clade family starts to explore for ways to get over the mountains. Patriarch Jaeger (Dennis Quaid) is desperate to push further and further to see what’s beyond. However, his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) spots an electric plant, Pando, that might solve a lot of Avalonia’s issues. Jaeger goes onward and disappears into the mountain void, leaving Searcher behind with the Pando. The younger Clade turns out to be right: Pando helps advance Avalonia technologically to the point that they have electric vehicles. But, a blight in the crop means Searcher, his wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) and his son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), get recruited by Avalonia’s leader Callisto (Lucy Liu) to go search for what is going wrong with the Pando before Avalonia gets sent back to the Stone Ages.
The best parts of Strange World are the visual razzle dazzle. The movie is a feast for the eyes, as the strange world is filled with all sorts of amazing colors and lands. Even though the storytellers took a vacation, the animators did not, crafting all sorts of crazy creatures bound for kids rooms: blue globular pets, flaming red pterodactyls, even creepy spider/octopus combinations. Each new chase or challenge leads us to an incredible new location, including a really well thought out explanation for the craziness the audience experiences. If anything I might have preferred Strange World more if it were a pseudo silent documentary, letting the amazing animators bring a child’s dreams and nightmare to life and just wallowing in the visual grandeur.
But I guess being a kids movie, we need some sort of story. That story is Strange World’s weak link, because it’s stuff Disney’s done before, and better. The movie’s core is built on fractured father son relationships (Jaeger/Searcher, and Searcher/Ethan), with generational failure to communicate causing friction among everyone. The movie repeats the conflicts a few times too many, and there’s so little character to Jaeger, Searcher, and Ethan that there’s little to no emotional punch from their story. Not great when you get more emotional heft from the blue glob Splat’s inner conflict than what the three main characters are feeling. I applaud some progressive relationship stuff Strange World does around the periphery, but generally the hollowness of the main emotional throughline leaves the movie only visual razzle dazzle and little else.
But hey, a mild swing and a miss is fine from an original movie idea like Strange World. Not all of Disney’s animated films can be megasmashes that bring everyone to tears. Some times you just gotta see some cool sh*t. Sorry, stuff. This is a kids movie; I’ll got and put a dollar in the swear jar.