Jaw-droppingly beautiful visuals gloss over weak plot
Don Hall directed Big Hero 6 back in 2014 – and that has long been one of my absolute favourite animated child-friendly movies of the last decade and more.
Big Hero 6 brought together some stunning character design, solved the riddles of nuance and emotion being clearly accessible in nonverbal characters – and managed to tell a story that was engrossing, surprising and genuinely moving.
Big Hero 6 doesn’t always get mentioned in the same breath as Moana, Frozen, Encanto and the other recent Disney immortals, but I reckon it should be right up there on anyone’s list.
So, finding out that Don Hall had also directed Strange World, of course I was happy to see it on my todo list – and very happy to catch a daytime weekday screening.
And, Strange World kind of lived up to expectations.
The film is gorgeously welldesigned and brought to life. Even when our expectations of Disney and co are stratospheric – it doesn’t get said enough, but we are living in a second golden age of animation right now – Strange World is still jawdroppingly beautiful.
The worlds it builds are fabulously well-rendered riots of detail and wit, with colour dripping from every pixel and genius on display in every creature and landscape that comes into view. We are spoiled for beauty on our cinema screens, but Strange World just nudged the bar a little higher.
The downside to all this visual and aural intoxication is that the script doesn’t quite – quite – live up to what we are watching and hearing.
The adult son of a long-missing explorer – and father to a teenager himself now – goes searching for the cause of a mystery ailment that is threatening his community’s most important crop. Pando – the crop – is a literal power plant. Its seed pods provide the electricity that runs the isolated country of Avalonia, high in the mountains, inside an impenetrable ring of cliffs and peaks.
Searcher Clade – the son – journeys underground, with his family unwittingly along for the ride, looking for the hidden source of the Pando, hoping to cure it and save his world.
The cast of characters here is terrific, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Jaboukie YoungWhite (C’mon C’mon) voicing the three generations of Clade men and Gabrielle Union (Sleepless) as Searcher’s wife, pilot and actual expedition leader (don’t tell the men) – and Lucy Liu as the president of Avalonia, also joining in the adventure.
There’s enough in-jokes here to clue-in the adults that the makers of Strange World know they are breaking many of the old rules of adventure films. ‘‘There’s no bad guy here?’’ asks Searcher at one point, ‘‘that’s going to make storytelling tough.’’ And indeed it does.
Strange World meanders a little through some fairly predictable plotting, before wrapping up with an explanation for the Pando sickness that is oddly over-complicated – even for this sole grown-up in the cinema.
But the spectacle, warmth, fun and love that has gone into every frame of Strange World is more than enough to power it past a few narrative problems.
On a proper screen, with Henry Jackman’s score pouring out of decent speakers, Strange World is an absolute trip.
And the children in the cinema were loving it just as much as me.