3 / 10
Official trailer
Strange World is the Walt Disney Animation Studios feature that recorded one of the worst opening weekends in modern Disney theatrical animation history. Don Hall directed. Qui Nguyen wrote. Jake Gyllenhaal voices Searcher Clade, a farmer in the isolated mountain valley of Avalonia. Dennis Quaid voices his estranged explorer father Jaeger. Jaboukie Young-White voices Ethan, Searcher’s gay teenage son. Gabrielle Union voices Meridian, Ethan’s mother. Lucy Liu voices President Callisto Mal, the Avalonian leader.
The plot follows the Clade family descending into a hollow subterranean ecosystem to investigate why the Pando plant, the energy source Avalonia depends on, is dying.
This one frustrates because there’s a far better movie buried under it. Disney spent a fortune building a gorgeous, weird underground world and then used it as a pulpit, and I came out of it feeling lectured by a cartoon that couldn’t be bothered to give me a story worth the lecture.
The film made approximately seventy-three million dollars worldwide on a one hundred and eighty million dollar budget. Disney took an approximately one hundred and forty-seven million dollar writedown.
The financial loss is among the most public of any Walt Disney Animation Studios theatrical release. The film effectively ended the studio’s mid-2020s theatrical strategy and accelerated Disney’s pivot toward streaming-first animation distribution.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
Three ideological commitments share the film’s center at the same time.
The first is the explicitly gay teenage protagonist. Ethan Clade is Disney Animation’s first openly gay teen lead, and the film treats his orientation as a settled fact instead of as a coming-out arc. The second is the environmental message. The Pando plant turns out to be an antibody of the giant living organism the Clades have been exploring. Avalonia has been killing the organism by harvesting Pando for energy. The third is the generational message. Jaeger represents conquest.
Searcher represents extraction. Ethan represents harmony. The grandfather and father are wrong. The grandson is right.
The Ethan storyline is the film’s most-discussed element because Disney’s marketing emphasized it.
The studio positioned Ethan as a milestone. The trailer included the moment where Ethan tells his father he’s a crush on a boy. The framing was that this film was making animation history by featuring an openly gay teen lead in a non-coming-out context. It also positioned the film as a test of whether American family audiences would accept the content. Family audiences responded by not buying tickets.
The environmental message is the film’s primary content. The Clades discover that Avalonia has been parasitically extracting Pando from the body of a living organism. The civilization the audience has spent the film’s setup learning to care about turns out to have been killing its host. The third-act decision is whether to let the host die so Avalonia can continue or to destroy Avalonia’s energy infrastructure so the host can live. The film argues unambiguously for destroying the energy infrastructure. The civilization is the problem. The wilderness is the moral truth.
At this point the film lost me for good. Spending an hour making Avalonia warm and likable and then cheering as its lights go out is a bait-and-switch, and I resent being asked to applaud it.
For Writers
A film that asks the audience to care about a civilization and then argues that the civilization is the moral problem has structured a contradiction. Strange World spends an hour making Avalonia warm, friendly, and worth investment. The film then asks the audience to celebrate the civilization’s energy collapse. The audience doesn’t switch positions on demand. The lesson is that argument can’t revoke emotional investment. If you want the audience to root for a civilization’s collapse, don’t first make them love the civilization.
Pick a position and stage the story to support it.
The Generational Sermon
The Clade family arc is the film’s emotional spine.
Jaeger is the explorer-conqueror grandfather. Searcher is the extractor-farmer father. Ethan is the environmentalist grandson. The three generations are positioned as a moral hierarchy. Each generation is more enlightened than the last. The film’s argument is that progress is the younger generation correcting the older generation’s wrongs.
The structure positions Ethan as the audience surrogate. The audience is meant to identify with the teenager who sees the truth his father and grandfather can’t see. The film doesn’t consider whether the audience watching with their families might also be parents and grandparents. The audience implicitly addressed is the teenage viewer being given moral instruction about how to correct their elders. The strategy alienated the actual ticket-buying demographic for Walt Disney Animation Studios features.
The grandfather, father and son pecking order grates harder than anything else in the script. Quaid and Gyllenhaal get reduced to wrong answers the kid corrects, and I’d have liked one scene where the older men were allowed to be right about something.
For Writers
A family film whose moral message is that parents and grandparents are wrong has misjudged its actual audience. The parents and grandparents are the ones buying tickets. The lesson is that audience demographic analysis applies to message design as much as to character design. If your work is told from the youngest character’s perspective and frames the older characters as obstacles to enlightenment, the older characters’ real-world counterparts will notice. They’re also the ones with credit cards. Choose your audience or choose your message. They sometimes conflict.
The Visual Design
The subterranean ecosystem of Strange World is the film’s best single element.
The art department designed an organic biological landscape that doesn’t resemble standard fantasy or science fiction environments. The terrain is purplish, pulsing, and uncanny. The creatures (the splatts, the reapers, the giant transit tubes) are visually distinct from Disney’s typical character design. The world is the most committed creative work in the production.
The visual design also reveals the film’s larger structural problem. The Strange World is more interesting than the Avalonia surface world the film keeps returning to. The audience comes out of the subterranean sequences engaged and out of the Avalonia sequences flat. The art department made a science fiction film about a weird biological landscape. The script kept dragging the action back to a thinly drawn surface civilization. The two halves of the film weren’t in conversation.
The underground is the one part of this film I’d watch again. I love the purples and the pulsing terrain, and every time the story dragged me back up to Avalonia I wanted to go straight back down.
For Writers
When your most-committed creative work happens in a part of your story you’re not committed to, you’ve structured the work backward. Strange World’s strongest material is in the subterranean ecosystem. The script treats the ecosystem as backdrop and the surface civilization as foreground. The lesson is that audiences orient toward where the craft has gone. If your art department has invested most heavily in a setting, the story should also live in that setting. Misalignment between craft investment and narrative emphasis produces films that feel structurally distracted.
Craft Note
The reaper creature design is the production’s single strongest visual achievement. The reapers are translucent, multi-legged, and emerge from caves with a wet shimmer that suggests deep-ocean biology instead of fantasy menace. The reaper sequences feature the film’s best sound design (a low organic chittering) and best lighting (bioluminescent green from below). The reapers should have been the film’s monster. The script uses them as set dressing. A Disney film built around the reapers as its central creature presence would have been a stranger, weirder, more memorable film than the one the production released.
Should you skip Strange World?
3/10, and I’m being generous because of the art department. The reapers and the subterranean world show what this team could have made if the script had trusted its own strangeness. The sermon about a civilization that deserves to go dark, the generational scolding and a marketing campaign that sold a milestone instead of a movie sank it, and the empty theaters told Disney as much. Watch it only for the visual design, preferably with the sound down during the speeches.
