Jaw-dropping visuals gloss over a weak plot
Strange World (PG, 102 mins) Directed by Don Hall Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Don Hall directed Big Hero 6 in 2014 and that has long been one of my favourite animated child-friendly movies of the past decade and more.
Big Hero 6 brought together some stunning character design, solved the riddles of nuance and emotion being clearly accessible in non-verbal characters and managed to tell a story that was engrossing, surprising and genuinely moving.
Big Hero 6 isn’t always mentioned in the same breath as Moana, Frozen, Encanto and the other recent Disney immortals, but I reckon it should be.
So, finding that Don Hall had also directed Strange World, I was happy to see it on my to-do list.
And, Strange World kind of lived up to expectations. The film is gorgeously well-designed 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 – Strange World is still jaw-droppingly beautiful.
The worlds it builds are fabulously well-rendered riots of detail and wit. Colour drips from every pixel and genius is on display in every creature and landscape that comes into view. We are spoilt for beauty on our screens, but Strange World just nudged the bar a little higher.
The downside to all this visual and aural intoxication is that the script to Strange World doesn’t quite live up to what we are watching and hearing.
The adult son of a long-missing explorer – and father to a teenager now – goes searching for the cause of a mystery ailment that is threatening his community’s most important crop, Pando, a 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, looking for the hidden source of the Pando, hoping to cure it and save his world.
The cast of characters here is terrific. Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Jaboukie Young-White (C’mon C’mon) voice the three generations of Clade men. Gabrielle Union (Sleepless) is Searcher’s wife, pilot and actual expedition leader (don’t tell the men) – and Lucy Liu is the President of Avalonia, who also joins in the adventure.
There are enough in-jokes 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 story-telling tough.’’ And indeed it does.
Strange World meanders a little through some predictable plotting, before wrapping up with an explanation for the Pando sickness that was 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 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.
Strange World is now screening in cinemas nationwide.