Travel past space and time to a place of infinite mystery!
Strange World is a 2022 animated sci-fi adventure film and the 61st entry in the Disney Animated Canon. It is directed by Don Hall (Big Hero 6, Raya and the Last Dragon) and stars the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu and Dennis Quaid. It premiered in theaters on November 23, 2022 (except in France where it debuted on Disney+ in 2023 after its theatrical run in other regions).The plot follows Searcher Clade (Gyllenhaal), a humble farmer who once traveled the world with his legendary explorer father Jaeger Clade (Quaid), whose legacy he could never live up to. When his country's president (Liu) calls upon him for a mission of dire importance, he and his wife (Union) and son (Young-White) join a dangerous expedition to a bizarre subterranean world full of equally bizarre lifeforms.
Notably, the film marked the first entry of Disney's 100th anniversary celebration, marked with a special Vanity Plate for the film and ending with the following entry in the studio's animated canon, Wish, released one year later.
Previews: Teaser Trailer
, International Teaser Trailer, Official Trailer, Official Trailer 2
Provides examples of:
- Ace Pilot: Meridian has the job of cropdusting the family farm, but throughout the movie, she proves herself capable of expertly flying any aircraft she comes across.
- Action Politician: The woman in charge of the expedition is none other than President Callisto Mal, who went on Jaeger's final expedition before he disappeared.
- Actor Allusion: Alan Tudyk plays Duffle, who suffers the same fate as Tudyk's character Wash in Serenity.
- Aerith and Bob: The Strange World characters have names such as Searcher, Meridian, Jaeger, Callisto, Caspian, Ethan, Duffle, Legend, and Splat.
- Alien Landmass: The setting for much of the movie is a bizarre subterranean environment made up of pink, organic surfaces that can move on their own.
- All There in the Manual: The making of book The Art of Strange World reveals the names of the rest of the Venture Crew. It even reveals that Captain Pulk is non-binary, something not made clear in the film at all.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Ethan is embarrassed when Searcher talks to his friends, because he tells lame jokes and tries to use cool teen talk.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Pando, discovered by Searcher in the opening scenes, is a plant that produces energized pods Avalonia grows to depend on for electrical power. It later turns out to be ultimately detrimental to everyone and everything in Avalonia.
- As Himself: Parodied—the end credits list Legend and Splat as being played by "himself" and "itself" respectively.
- Artistic License – Biology: The purpose of a heart is to pump blood and other fluids throughout the body using its contractions. However, the creature's cells, including its equivalent of blood cells, are self-propelled and autonomous, not even requiring veins to contain them, so it's not clear what the point of its heart is.
- Attack on the Heart: Pando's parasitic attachment to the titular strange world's heart is slowly killing it.
- Badass Family: Once they get past their hangups, the Clades all work together with each one's unique set of talents.
- Bait-and-Switch: Throughout the film after reuniting, Searcher crediting his mother's new husband Sheldon for parenting him in Jaeger's absence, and giving the impression that he got along with him a lot better than he did his father, gives both Jaeger and the audience the impression that Sheldon must be a small, sensitive man like Searcher himself. Especially since he's blamed for things like Searcher's abysmal throwing technique. Once Sheldon is actually seen in the epilogue it turns out that he's actually even larger and brawnier than Jaeger is, being more of a Gentle Giant.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: As Searcher boards the ship, Caspian tells him that he's a big fan...of his dad.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Splat decides to help the Clades after Ethan treats a burn on one of its tentacles.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The entire film. Most notably, the creature has symbiotic organisms that can instantaneously regrow dead tissues, its "blood" appears to be giant schools of flatworm-adjacent cells, it's possible to travel directly from a hole in its back to its lungs to its stomach to its heart, and its heart lies in a cavity near an opening that is also near its face (the zoom out at the end indicates the heart must be in its neck, despite an illustrated diagram showing the heart in the upper chest). Despite this, the end of the film depicts it as turtle-like when seen from space.
- Book Ends: The film's storyline in the present day depicts Searcher farming Pando with his family. It ends on Searcher farming with his father, this time harvesting tomatoes.
- Botanical Abomination: While Pando is useful for powering human society, it is also a parasitic plant that is slowly killing the creature everyone lives on by tunneling through it and constraining its heart.
- Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Searcher remembers his father as obsessive and uncaring, focusing on his goals and adventuring lifestyle rather than listening to his son about what he wanted out of life. Now that he's an adult, he puts his family first, and wants nothing but for Ethan to live the safe life of a farmer...unaware that he's doing to Ethan exactly what his father did to him. Ethan ultimately calls them both out for this. Ultimately, Searcher plays this trope straight by listening to what Ethan wants and encouraging him to lead the life he wants.
- Call-Forward: One of the last images in the credits is Star from the next, upcoming Disney animated film Wish.
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- Ethan does this to his father, Searcher, while arguing for not accepting of who he is.
- Searcher does this to his father, Jaeger, for abandoning him as well as not believing him about Pando. He later points out how he's about to sacrifice his entire legacy for his own son's future because that's the job of a father but Jaegar won't do the same for him.
- Cannot Spit It Out: Ethan can't bring himself to tell Diazo that he likes him as more than a friend, because he gets tongue-tied every time he tries.
- Climate Change Allegory: Avalonia's use of Pando is slowly destroying the heart of the very creature their entire world is built upon. Does that remind you of anything?
- Company Cross References:
- To Atlantis: The Lost Empire—The Clades trying to keep president Callisto from making the Pando infection worse is very reminiscent of what happens when Milo realizes Roark's true purposes for visiting Atlantis and tries to stop him - both scenes even take place on similar airships! The general tone of the film is also very similar.
- It also features a reference to Winnie the Pooh (2011); the Backson from that movie appears during the closing credits.
- Compensating for Something: After informing Jaeger that they both have statues erected of them in Avalonia, Searcher very hastily adds that his statue is larger than his father's.
- Contrived Coincidence: Mere moments after arriving in the subterranean world of Avalonia, an environment the size of an entire continent, Searcher encounters his long-lost father.
- Cool Ship: One is used to explore the subterrane of Avalonia, and it is a very steampunk-y affair with propellers AND engines. At the end of the film, society has moved on to wind power and we see vehicles with hot air balloons, sails and propellers.
- Creative Closing Credits: The first half of the credits features some stunning concept art.
- Culture Chop Suey: Avalonia and its citizens have Tibetan aesthetics among their urban buildings and attire along with 1930s American vibes, which are appropriate for its location among the mountain ranges.
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Jaeger justifies leaving Searcher and his wife behind because he believed it was his destiny to find what was on the other side of the mountains. Searcher disagrees that this was a good reason.
- Disappeared Dad: Searcher's father, Jaeger Clade, went missing on him when he was fifteen during one expedition in which he decided he would make it over the mountains alone. As it turns out, he has been residing in the Strange World for twenty-five years.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: After learning the truth about Pando, its roots start to look an awful lot like cancer veins.
- Eldritch Location: The film mostly takes place in one of these, miles below the surface of the Avalonian continent. It's a bizarre place where even the landscape can be a living creature. The film's big reveal is that the continent is itself a living creature that resembles a turtle.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: A plane and a hover-bike both crash in huge, fiery explosions, even though they're electric vehicles that have no combustible fuel.
- Eyeless Face: None of the creatures in the Strange World have eyes.
- Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: The flying creatures who attack the ship are rather reminiscent of pterosaurs, but are clearly something different.
- Fantastic Naming Convention: Downplayed, but Avalonian parents seem to prefer names based on the concept of hunting or exploring note , navigational, cartographical, or geographical termsnote , or scientific conceptsnote . It's not universal, though, given there are names that don't fit this pattern, such as Ethan, Caspian, Duffle, and Pulk.
- "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: The movie's plot can be considered a version of this because while none of the characters shrink, their entire journey actually occurs within the body of a gargantuan animal.
- Fictional Earth: The final shot reveals that the movie's version of Earth is nothing but water, the only landmass being a giant Turtle Island where Avalonia and the Strange World are set.
- First-Step Fixation: The Clades are locked in a room with Splat, a local being lacking anything resembling a skeleton. The room can be opened via a switch that is outside it and they hear their dog, Legend, coming close to it. As the Clades' efforts to get Legend to activate the switch prove fruitless, Splat gets frustrated, slides under the door, does what's needed to make it openable by Legend, then returns inside the room to get freed alongside the Clades.
- Foreshadowing:
- Looking out over his fields of Pando, Searcher compares their rhythmic glowing to a heartbeat. He's closer to the truth than he realizes, though maybe not in the way he expected.
- The name Pando itself being reminiscent of Pandora's Jar...
- During a game of Primal Outpost, Ethan tries to explain that the point isn't to fight for survival but to find a way to live harmoniously with your environment. As the game shows them, killing off an apparently threatening creature might damage the ecosystem and leave you suffering to survive the consequences.
- The game also foreshadows and makes fun of how there aren't any traditional bad guys in the film, save for a brief mutiny.
- Splat getting hurt by touching a Pando seed foreshadows its damaging nature.
- Pando's green glow starts looking increasingly out-of-place in the warm colours of the environments the deeper the expedition goes, which foreshadows Pando being a foreign body or infection.
- Forgot About His Powers: When the Clades and Splat get locked in a closet, Splat apparently doesn't remember that he can shapeshift and easily escape and open the door. Lampshaded when he comes out to unlock the door, then goes back in to wait for Legend to open it instead.
- Forgotten Fallen Friend: Lieutenant Duffle is pulled from the ship by a reaper early in the mission, and he never reappears, nor does anyone even mention him for the rest of the movie.
- Funny Background Event: When Ethan starts trying to get out of weeding a field, Legend is staring at a plate of avocado toast on the table. The camera then cuts to Searcher. When it goes back to Ethan, the toast is gone and Legend is licking his chops, looking guilty with avocado on his face.
- Generational Trauma: When Searcher Clade was an adolescent, his father Jaeger tried to make him a tough, adventurous explorer. Searcher has tried to distance himself from his father since, but he unknowingly replicates his father's rearing by trying to make his son Ethan a farmer regardless of his son's wishes.
- Genre Throwback: The film serves as one to the pulp fiction genre. This is furthered bolstered by both the domestic poster and the teaser trailer, which gives the film an impression of a pulpy B-movie from the 1950s. The film begins with a sequence introducing us to Jaeger Clade, reminiscent of the televised adventure serials of the 40s.
- Genius Loci: Of the Turtle Island variety. Turns out the entire world of the movie is set on top of and within the guts of this creature.
- Giant Flyer: The red flying creatures that attack the airship are large, very aggressive, and pterodactyl-like.
- Giant Eye of Doom: Ethan and Searcher first realize the continent of Avalonia is a giant sea creature when they gaze upon its massive eye. In this case, however, no doom entails.
- Gift-Giving Gaffe: When the two meet in the titular strange world, Searcher calls out Jaeger for giving him a machete as a gift on his 2nd birthday. This is how Jaeger knows he's not hallucinating his son.
- Green Aesop: Society's source of energy, Pando, is literally a parasitic plant that is killing the earth. At the end of the film, and with great effort, Avalonia switches over to a renewable and clean source of energy (wind). There's some Lampshade Hanging when Ethan tells his father and grandpa that the card game they're playing to pass the time is about "learning to live in harmony with the environment around you".
- Grounded Forever: When Meridian meets up with Searcher, Jaeger, and Ethan, she is quick to tell Ethan that he is grounded for the rest of his life after taking a skiff and riding off into the strange world on his own.
- Healing Factor: The creature the world is built on has small creatures inside it that near instantly repair any damage it sustains if the source of the damage ceases. This is an important factor, as it allows its heart to regenerate after Pando is destroyed when it seems to have died.
- Hollow World: The titular Strange World appears to be miles below the planet's surface. It's subverted, it's actually the insides of the massive Turtle Island the main characters live on.
- Homage: To Fantastic Voyage after the fact.
- This has quite a lot in common with the movie of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Going off of a photo, Jaeger’s wife Penelope is shorter and more slender than her hefty husband. When Jaeger returns to Penelope at the very end, we see Penelope’s new husband Sheldon is even taller and heftier than Jaeger!
- I Choose to Stay: At the end of the movie, Ethan decides to stay in the strange world with Diazo and Splat. Not as severe as other examples, though, in that it seems Ethan can return at any time as shown by his group of friends visiting him on an airship.
- Like Father, Unlike Son: Both Jaeger/Searcher and Searcher/Ethan believe they fall under this trope, until they realize they have more in common than they thought.
- Meaningful Appearance: All of the Clade men have the same Gag Nose, but beyond that, Searcher and Ethan both much more strongly resemble their mothers, tying into the film's themes about not forcing a Generation Xerox.
- Meaningful Name:
- The main protagonists of the film are part of the Clade family. A "clade" is the name for a scientific group of organisms, appropriate for a group of explorers finding strange creatures. Driving this point further is that the grandfather is named "Jaeger" (German for "hunter") and the father is simply named "Searcher". Ethan breaks this naming convention and decides to make a legacy all his own, outside of the shadow of his family.
- Pando shares its name with one of the largest known organisms on Earth, a colony of genetically-identical aspen trees with a shared root network. It also means "I spread" in Latin. And its name sounds a bit similar to "pandemic" and "Pandora's Jar."
- Jaeger's wife and Searcher's mom is called Penelope, like the wife of another famous explorer (The Odyssey).
- Mega-Microbes: All of the creatures in the subterranean world are the equivalent of Avalonia's cells, with organisms that fulfill the role of red blood cells, white blood cells, stem cells, nerve cells, and others. The whole creature is the size of a continent, so its cells range up to dinosaur-sized organisms.
- Missing Mom: For once, this common Disney trope is subverted. Searcher tells Jaeger that his wife Penelope is gone, which Jaeger takes as being dead. Searcher then clarifies that she got remarried to someone named Sheldon and moved in with him because Jaeger was presumed dead for 25 years.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: Played with in that Jaeger's first reaction to finding out his wife remarried is to declare he will kill her new husband Sheldon.
- Never Trust a Trailer: In the trailer, Callisto delivers the "If you want to back out, now's your chance" line. In the actual movie, Lieutenant Duffle says it.
- No Antagonist: The main conflict at the end of the film is caused by Pando, the disease that is ravaging the massive monster that is Avalonia. As Pando is neither sapient nor a creature, the closest things the film has to a sentient antagonist are the Reapers, which attempt to eat the heroes several times but are eventually revealed to be part of the creature's natural immune system, and Callisto Mal, who is an antagonist for around 5 minutes of the film's runtime when she assumes command of the ship in an attempt to continue the Venture's mission despite Searcher and Ethan's revelation concerning Pando's nature before being shown the light very quickly by the protagonists. The film's whole message of protecting the environment and learning to do better as a society wouldn't work with a standard villain.
- Gets Lampshaded during the Primal Outpost scene, where Jaeger and Searcher have trouble understanding that there are no villains in the game, with Jaeger calling it "poor storytelling".
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The Reapers and red bird-like monsters are this, being simply a part of Avalonia's immune system who mistook the Clades for a threat.
- Open-Minded Parent: Searcher, Meridian, and Jaegar are all supportive of Ethan’s crush on Diazo.
- Palette Swap: There is shown to be another scout blob like Splat who likes exactly like him, but red.
- Parental Sexuality Squick: Ethan is grossed out whenever he sees Searcher and Meridian show affection to each other. At the same time, Jaeger annoys his son when Searcher asks rhetorically how Jaeger is his father, by taking the statement literally and starting The Talk, leading Searcher to tell him to stop talking.
- Picture-Perfect Presentation: Used as Book Ends. The introduction of the Clades is the beginning of a comic which becomes animated action. And the outro is the end of Ethan's letter to his father on the farm turning into a comic panel.
- Poor Communication Kills: Since Splat can't talk, he is unable to warn the Clades about their mission.
- Rescue Romance: Jaeger's advice for Ethan to woo his crush is to manufacture one of these. Ethan thinks it's a very toxic way to start a relationship.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: Searcher rhetorically asks Jaeger how he's his father. Jaeger immediately answers by going into The Talk. To his adult son who is a father himself.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter:
- Splat, despite being a faceless Blob Monster. Lampshaded by Caspian.Caspian: It's so cute! I wanna merchandise it.
- Legend, the Clades' three-legged sheep dog.
- Splat, despite being a faceless Blob Monster. Lampshaded by Caspian.
- Sickly Green Glow: Pando glows green, which is a hint that foreshadows it being a disease that's killing the creature Avalonia sits on.
- Silver Fox: Searcher mentions to Jaeger that his mom is currently 60 years old and works out regularly. When we see her reconnect with Jaeger at the end of the movie, she is shown to be pretty good-looking for a 60-year-old woman.
- Shout-Out:
- Primal Outpost, a tabletop game with hexagonal cards that focuses on resource management, evokes Settlers of Catan.
- Jaeger's wife is called Penelope, like the one of Odysseus, the archetypal traveler and explorer from The Odyssey, but ironically, this Penelope remarries. Moreover, Odysseus' son, Telemachus, is content being a ruler in their hometown of Ithaca instead of a warrior/hero/adventurer like his father.
- Steampunk: Avalonia, especially its Pando-powered airships, definitely evoke this aesthetic. This continues even after the Clades destroy Pando and replace it with wind power.
- Storybook Opening: Inverted. The movie ends by turning the last scene into a comic panel and then closing the comic, revealing the title of the movie and the cast on the front page.
- That's No Moon: The entire continent that Avalonia sits upon is actually a massive sea creature succumbing to the disease that created Pando.
- Theme Tune: In-universe. It even gets a new verse after the family returns from Strange World.They're the Clades! They're the Clades!
- Time-Passage Beard: Jaeger is shown to have an incredibly long and ragged beard when Ethan and Searcher find him in the strange world.
- Turtle Island: It turns out that the entire landmass upon which both Avalonia and Strange World are situated is actually a massive sea creature rather resembling a turtle, as Searcher and Ethan find out when they make it to the other side of the mountains and find themselves gazing upon the turtle's giant eye.
- Wham Line:Ethan: This place is alive. It's a living thing. We didn't find the heart of Pando—we found an actual heart.
Searcher: So, all this time, we've been living on the back of this giant creature?
Ethan: Yeah, and Pando is killing it. - Wham Shot: When Searcher and Ethan end up on the other side of the mountains, the mountains themselves seem to rise up out of the ocean, revealing a giant eye.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We're left to assume the original pilot fell to his death, since we never see what became of him and the creatures don't seem to eat meat.
- Womb Level: The entire film takes place within the guts of a massive Turtle Island.
