THE ODD-YSSEY
A fantastic voyage into Disney’s retro sci-fi wonderland.
Old-school pulp sci-fi is the inspiration behind Strange World, an adventure romp from the director and writer behind Raya And The Last Dragon. Telling Teasers of his influences, director Don Hall namechecks Miyazaki, before adding, “We knew this was going to be that type of adventure film where explorers find a hidden world – tracing that idea all the way back to Jules Verne’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot [trilogy] was very fun and delightful.”
1. DADDY ISSUES
At the core is a double-decker father-son story. Farmer Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) hasn’t followed in the footsteps of his pa, missing adventurer Jaeger (Dennis Quaid). Meanwhile, Searcher’s son, Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), is itching for a life beyond the farm. “As [Don] was looking at all these pulp novels and things like that – there was always this character that emerged… like Doc Savage and Indiana Jones,” says co-director/writer Qui Nguyen. “But I think the fun, innovative thing that Don did was [making it] about his kid, who was going to be his sheer opposite.”
2. STYLE GUIDE
Following Raya, which Hall calls “generally speaking, one of our most realistic movies”, visually, he went in a completely different direction. “We looked at French and Belgian comics as a place to start, and that influenced our character designer Jin Kim to start pumping out some amazing designs that were a little more broad. It really evoked the Disney style of the late ’40s through the ’50s.”
3. SPLAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
A crucial ingredient in any Disney adventure is the loveable sidekick, though Splat is a faceless, tentacled creature, making for a particular animation challenge. “One of the things I learned on Big Hero 6 was how much our animators can do with very little. I wanted to take it one step further, and say, ‘OK, you’re going to get, basically, a circle blob with gloopy tentacles, and let’s see what you can do with that.’” “It’s the silent characters who are always the most engaging,” says producer Roy Conli. “The animators can bring [them] alive.”
4. HOME FRONT
The Clades live in the lush farming community of Avalonia, which has been transformed by a unique crop that serves as an energy source. It’s a stark contrast, visually, to the sci-fi wonderland that the Clades will later explore. “Avalonia had straight shapes to the farm, and then when you get down into the strange world, it’s all round,” says Conli. “We wanted to create a kind of utopia – a warm, nostalgic feeling to emphasise that this is a wonderful culture that everybody enjoys,” explains production designer Justin Cram.
5. UNCHARTED TERRITORY
The strange world that the Clades’ mission takes them to is populated with all manner of weird flora, fauna and fantastic beasts. “It was a trickier one, because this world could be anything,” says Hall. “So we started [wanting] it to not look like the ‘top world’ in terms of colour and shape language. Let it be in contrast to Avalonia, which is more naturalistic. And then the artists started looking at all kinds of different stuff – coral reefs, weird fungus, sausages, food. It was a really big pot of influences.”
6. CALL TO ACTION
An adventure movie is nothing without spectacular set-pieces. “In writing an animated film, you’re working directly with your story artist to figure out this crazy thing,” says Nguyen. “Here, it was with the story artist, Javier [Ledesma], who really kind of came up with this crazy idea: ‘What if we ran away from monsters by running on the top of other monsters to get away? And then the monsters will come apart, and they’ll fall, and we’ll have a hovercraft show up.’ From the designs to the action sequences to the emotional turns of the films, we were always trying to keep the roller coaster having great drops and surprises.”
STRANGE WORLD OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 23 NOVEMBER.