Delayed Reaction: Strange World

Premise: When his town's power supply gets threatened, a farmer turns reluctant explorer to find out what is wrong and go further from home than he ever intended.

 

Disney Animation needs to give up on this, right? We know what works with Disney Animation. They let Pixar do their thing. Disney Animation is great at the fairy tales and princesses. Musicals they make into classics. They can approximate the Pixar thing well enough with a Wreck-It Ralph or Zootopia. No matter how well they make the movies though, they just can't get audiences to care about adventure movies. Raya and the Last Dragon had the COVID excuse, but honestly, does anyone think that was going to be a blockbuster without COVID? Two of the studio’s biggest busts ever were the early 2000s back-to-back of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. The forgotten movie in the Disney Renaissance, right between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast was The Rescuers Down Under, which managed a meager $27 million. Every decade or two, Disney Animation just needs to test the theory again, I guess.

 

There's nothing wrong with the movies either. They tend to be remembered well. They just never attract audiences to match their budgets. In that respect, it's hard to call Strange World any kind of outlier. It was always doomed to underperform at the box office. It certainly doesn't help that Disney had no idea how to market it. In a box office landscape where audiences need a reason to go and see something, Strange World offered nothing tangible to hold onto. Hell, even Pixar's once untouchable brand name couldn't turn Lightyear into a hit during the summer.

That said, Strange World is an enjoyable movie. It's clever and exciting. There are some good twists. The messaging was a little blunt, but that's true of even the best Disney Animation features. It's the kind of movie that will be best remembered as “one of the movies of the 2020s” for Disney animation rather than as a singular hit. Because, while enjoyable, there's aren't any standout characters, designs, or visuals. The best Disney Animation movies have something special at the core that they then attach to a plot like Strange World. Like Aladdin or even Up aren't that different from Strange World. Aladdin has the Genie and those songs to supplement it. Up has the balloon house visual and that infamous opening to supplement it. Strange World is just the adventure.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend