When the Walt Disney Company dabbles in family-friendly science fiction, catastrophe follows. Around the turn of the 1980s, they tried to get in on that Star Wars action, with The Black Hole and TRON in 1979 and 1982. Soon after both flopped, the company was taken over in a hostile coup, as the animation division underwent the industry-redefining birth pains of The Black Cauldron, which suffered the most acriminous and miserable production of any animated feature in U.S. history.

Early in the new millennium, they tried again, with Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet in 2001 and 2002. Soon after both flopped, and as a direct result of that floppage, the company shuttered the 2-D animation department that had defined that medium in America and around the world for some seven decades, leaving Walt Disney Animation to spend several years as a laughingstock in the field.

Only time will tell what ugly fate awaits Disney now that they've tried for the third time to kick that darn football with Strange World. Maybe only the fact that Strange World is itself, you guessed it, a bona-fide bomb, shaping up to make about as much many U.S. dollars in 2022 as TRON made in 1982. There has been a ton of extremely tedious digital ink spilled on both sides of the culture war about whether this is because Strange World had the bravery and/or woke effrontery to introduce a gay teenage boy as one of its lead characters, but of course the actual reason is because Strange World is shitty and boring, and Disney was whole bunch of fucking idiots for having made it in the first place. The Disney Sci-FI Curse is real. Taunt it at your peril.

Anyway, having now tipped my hand, I suppose I should dive into the whys and wherefores of Strange World being such a desperate slog of a thing - the most purely boring Disney animated feature since probably Brother Bear in 2003. Parsimony suggests that we should at least partially blame co-director Don Hall, who has a perfect losing streak in CGI features, having previously filled that function on 2021's Raya and the Last Dragon and 2014's Big Hero 6 (he also, to his credit, co-directed the 2011 Winnie the Pooh, which I continue to think is very lovely and good). Some people have great storytelling instincts, which of course implies that some people have terrible anti-instincts, and unfortunately one of these seems to have become one of Disney's "guys" of late. And probably some non-credit should also go to writer and co-director Qui Nguyen, who entered Disney's sphere with that same Raya. At least Strange World doesn't share that film's most conspicuous, aching flaw, its world-class horrendous comedy; indeed, Strange World isn't putting any particular effort into being "funny" at all, when it can make do with a simple lightness of tone that's sort of amusing in a casual and non-taxing way.

The story of Strange World is every bit as "oh, sure, I guess" as its sense of humor. Would you believe, a dad who has big plans for his son, but the son would rather go off and do his own thing? Would you believe two dads, and two sons? Because that's what we have in the Clade family: legendary adventurer Jaeger (Dennis Quaid), a jovial mountain of a man, who begat Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pacific farmer of the region's most vital crop, who begat Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) - Ethan? Jaeger, Searcher, and Ethan?  Fuck all the way off in a half-dozen directions - a shy board game geek who is trying to work up the courage to admit that he has a crush on a boy at school, a fact that is extremely obvious to all their mutual friends and the boy himself. Once upon a time, Jaeger wanted Searcher to be a great explorer, and when Jaeger disappeared into the mountains, Searcher instead became the primary cultivator of "pando" a green, glowing plant whose berries can be used as powerful electrical batteries. In 25 short years, this discovery completely altered the technological profile of Avalonia, a nation-state in a large valley ringed on all sides by impassable mountains, causing literally centuries of development in one generation. Nobody in the film seems to think much of this. Searcher now hopes to turn his pando empire over to Ethan, but Ethan wants... well, Ethan doesn't actually have a personality, and the reason is very obviously because the Disney people think that "he's gay" is sufficient, but he doesn't want to farm, anyway.

What bring all of this standard-issue generational conflict to a head is that something is affecting all of the pando crops, and Avalonia's leader, Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu) - Jaeger, Searcher, Callisto, and Ethan? - a former colleague of Jaeger's, conscripts Searcher to join her on a journey to the same mountainous region where Jaeger was lost. Ethan of course tags along, and is thus followed by his mom & Searcher's wife, ace hovership pilot Meridian (Gabrielle Union) - Jaeger, Searcher, Callisto, Meridian, and Ethan? - who ends up being particularly useful to have on-hand once Callisto's expedition is attacked by some kind of bright magenta pterodactyls, killing the pilot they initially brought. So in short order, all of our characters have crashed into a cave system, emerging to find a brightly-lit, massive landscape - a strange world, even - full of an extremely large number of hostile creatures, beautiful fantasy landscapes, and shades of pink. Salmon, rose, peach, fuschia, you name it: if it's pink or pink-adjacent, it's probably here someplace. This can't ultimately be counted against the film, because it ends up making sense, but if your film has based 100% of its spectacular appeal on the extraordinary design of a miraculous alien landscape, surely that landscape can have, like a single contrasting color? But it still has a pretty good "prog rock album cover" vibe that's always creative enough, even if the sheer pinkness of it ends up being way too monotonous for something that certainly doesn't have anything besides spectacle to sell.

Storywise, after all, it goes right to the exact place it had to go: Jaeger is alive in the strange world, and he and Searcher pick up their prickly relationship right where they left it off, while Ethan finds his reckless braggart of a grandpa to be a lot cooler than his bland milksop dad. It's kind of soothing, actually, how few surprises Strange World asks us to digest. We know where this is all going within five minutes of the movie starting, it gets there about five minutes before the movie ends, and we're not really troubled by learning a single thing about any of the characters or the world they inhabit during that time. At one point, a board game is played; it has an in-universe title, but it's pretty obviously actually called Subtext & Symbolism, because it involves the Clades describing, explicitly and at length, the exact structure of their interpersonal conflict and the way that the ecosystem of the strange world will help them resolve that conflict. It is nice to see, after the equally bald-faced way that Raya announced its themes of trust, that Hall and Nguyen have a "thing".

Seriously, though, we don't learn a damn thing about the characters or the world, and it's vexing as hell. Avalonia makes absolutely no sense as anything other than a concept in a parable (which I guess it what it is): how it got there, where the people came from, how they haven't died off in a couple of generations, these are all insoluble questions that are just present enough to really start to nettle one as the film goes along. Especially because they only become more insoluble as we get to know more about the geology of this land.

All that being said, there is an unmistakable appeal to touring around this bizarre landscape of floating objects and various incomprehensible death traps, so on the level of raw animated spectacle, Strange World at least has some good awe to strike. That's not the same as saying that it is a well-animated film, since I frankly think that it's not: the character designs here are some of the very worst in the 99-year history of Disney, a wholly ineffective attempt to create bulbous, rounded character designs in two dimensions that then transfer nicely into three. And we can see this, because the film opens with a 2-D prologue (with work contributed by Disney icons Eric Goldberg and Mark Henn), where we get to see what Jaeger and Searcher look like as hand-drawn doodles, and it's pretty great! Very reminiscent of '40s or '50s American cartoons, in a way that fits the gung-ho throwback energy this sequence believes itself to possess (in fact, it mostly feels like a watered-down Up knockoff). The minute we see those designs wrapped onto three-dimensional armatures, they become surreally awful to contemplate, and somehow, all in different ways: the five main characters in Strange World all seem to have come from five different movies, and Meridian is the only one whose movie isn't ugly (Callisto's wasn't even made by Disney, given that about 90% of her screentime is dominated by a DreamWorks smirk).

This makes for some deeply unpleasant company, not helped by the across-the-board weak voice acting; Quaid is pretty clearly the best-in-show, and not because he's doing anything very special. Gyllenhaal's voice is particularly ill-suited to voice acting, it turns out, devoid of edges or sharp, interesting-sounding tones, making Searcher every bit as bland as his father and son accuse him of being.

To be clear, none of this means the film is bad. Would that it were. This is fine and dull, even worse. Being mad at this would require that it had made some actual choices with actual stakes to them, and that is emphatically not something that happened here. This is just formulaic, droning bullshit, caked up in some fanciful CGI landscapes that aren't even beautiful, just elaborate. It's one of the sleepiest movies Disney has ever released, and it's a hell of a dismal way for the studio to start gearing up for its centennial - 100 years of tradition to end up with this? More like a depressing world, if you ask me.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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