What would you get if you crossed Avatar with Fantastic Voyage and rendered the result as a computer-animated movie? The answer is the dazzling Don Hall-directed 2022 Disney film that I watched on 4 January 2023 - Strange World, which certainly lives up to its title, but in the best possible manner.
Living in Avalonia, a land isolated from the rest of the world by a ring of unscaleable mountains, its citizens are shocked (pun intended!) when their crops of extraordinary energy-generating plants (pando) that power everything begin to die. It seems as if the single huge underground pando root from which they all grow is itself dying, but why?
Via a small aerial powered craft, a team of explorers headed by Avalonia president Callisto Mal voiced by Lucy Liu) bravely descend deep below the surface of Avalonia in best 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' style in a bold bid to uncover the reason, and duly encounter an astonishing hitherto-unsuspected world beneath their own, filled with incredible life forms of psychedelic pulchritude, fluid form, tentacular terror, and winged wonder, unlike anything ever before seen. But that is only the beginning of their spectacular voyage of discovery.
It turns out that their entire world, above and below the surface of Avalonia, and in harmonious homage to the Gaia Hypothesis, is a single ginormous living organism, and that this bizarre underground realm which they are now travelling through in their craft is actually that mega-organism's internal biological system!
As if that were not mind-boggling enough, moreover, the energy-generating pando plants that the exploration team had specifically set out to save actually prove to be deadly parasitic pests that are killing the world-organism from within. Indeed, the reason why these plants are themselves dying is the concerted effort of the world-organism's weird but wonderful immune-system creatures – for that is what the bizarre beasties all around the team turn out to be – to try and save it by destroying the plants' gigantic root!
Yet all of that is itself just one aspect of this fascinating sci fi adventure movie, which also explores the complex and often contentious father/son relationship down through three generations of the Clade family – from still-indomitable if now-elderly explorer Jaeger (Dennis Quaid), via Jaeger's resolute farmer son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), to Searcher's career-undecided teenage son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) – who are jointly leading the expeditionary team, albeit in very different directions! But will they unify their divergent driving forces and dreams sufficiently to succeed in rescuing their own world above by saving this previously-unknown one below, and within whose uncertain fate they now find themselves irrevocably immersed?
Apart from its including Disney's first openly gay animated lead character, Ethan, Strange World attracted virtually no interest, attention, or reactions from either the movie critics or the general public when it was released, swiftly sinking almost without trace. This is both a great tragedy and (at least to me) a great mystery.
For although I agree with the numerous comments of viewers online that the plot aspects focusing upon the Clades' interactions with one another tend to be less than engrossing, Strange World is an absolutely fantastic film visually, totally unlike anything previously produced even by this premier and infinitely versatile animation company, and easily ranking imho among the most artistically-inspired examples of the latter's cinematic output in recent years.
So, if you love marvelously imaginative movies with gorgeously-rendered alien landscapes populated by crazy creatures beyond your wildest dreams (some of which look like hallucinatory simulacra of the primordial but surrealistic Burgess Shale fauna!), you need to watch Strange World! Click here and here to view a couple of eye-popping official trailers for it on YouTube, and you'll see exactly what I mean!
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