It has always been considered that the biggest failures of the Walt Disney animation studio were those works that arose just after the renaissance period: things (unfairly) forgotten like ‘Discovering the Robinsons’, ‘Atlantis: The Lost Empire’ or ‘Treasure Planet’. But the truth is that any of these three grossed at least four times more than ‘Strange World’, a film that will live in infamy… and that, to be honest, didn’t quite deserve it.
Spreading the blame
Upon arrival at Disney+ we can finally ask ourselves what happened to ‘Strange World’: Was it the result of an almost non-existent marketing campaign? Did Disney let her die outright? Does it have to do with her fear of showing LGBT and racialized content? Does science fiction scare children? Or simply, they released it in theaters in a testimonial way and was it always destined to enlarge the Disney+ catalog? Probably the solution to the enigma of this film is a mixture of all of them.
After the success of ‘Encanto’, it is normal that the company is looking for its next big viral bombshell, but ‘Weird World’ is not going to be. And it is that, despite its good intentions, it is a very linear work, with an adventure in which you know exactly what is going to happen from the first scene and that offers no emotions or surprises: it feels more routine than excitingand that ends up weighing down a film that is supposed to be a fast-paced milestone in modern Disney cinema.
‘Strange World’ Has All the Ingredients You’d Expect in an adventure and science fiction movie brand of the house: weird and funny bug that makes strange sounds, parents and children who meet again and must collaborate despite themselves, environmental message, people who end up involved in the adventure of a lifetime by chance … Well, in short, the basic classics of a film of this style. I would like to say “And yet it works”, but the truth is that, no matter how angry I am to admit it, it never stops working.
Poisoned Christmas present
A lot has to change public sentiment towards the new Disney movie for it to become the vital phenomenon they want it to be. Without songs, mythical sequences or easily viralizable scenesit is most likely that ‘Strange World’ lives the same apathy at home as in the cinema: it is not because of its progressive decisions (even if four hotheads blame it on the protagonist’s son being gay or on showing a interracial marriage), but by an adventure that has no stem.
There is some great design work on the tape and of course the animation is superior, but after discovering what 3D is capable of doing in ‘Spider-man: a new universe’ or ‘Charm’ itself, it seems to take several steps back. It does not go further or show anything that we have not seen in a thousand movies before. It tries to evoke the feelings of a family discovering a new world, but it really comes down to three or four more or less exploited ideas. Even the funny mascot of the day, Splat, he does not finish giving the necessary tenderness to want to see him more -or better, get his stuffed animal-.
‘Strange world’ was born with the pretensions of imitating the serial and the classic adventure film, the one that was broadcast in theaters episodically, but it only succeeded in its early stages, with a fabulous presentation that hooked the viewer. And it is that he immediately gets lost in his own world because of a story that has its greatest fragility in its simplicity. At no time does she want to stray from the path she sets for herself and the result is visually good (not spectacular either) but very poor in other aspects.
ordinary world
But despite be made with a template, not offer any distinctive elementin dire need of a script revision (and a villain) and offering an old-fashioned adventure, ‘Weird World’ didn’t deserve to be the absolute bump that it has been: according to the source, has lost between 70 and 130 million dollarsmore than the budget of, for example, ‘Raya and the Last Dragon’ or ‘Tiana and the Frog’.
The fact that a film is generic and lacks charisma is not a sufficient reason for such an aberrational failure. Although it should serve as a wake-up call for the studio to invest more in original stories and less in adventures without a real objective (the moral of ‘Strange World’ from minute one is, once again, that we must protect our ecosystem), it is may serve for the company to make other very different decisions trying to minimize the risk.
I have no doubt that at one point along the way, ‘Strange World’ was gripping, Posed as the crazy adventure of a family trying to survive in a world that is not theirs, but in the end the ‘Flash Gordon’ aesthetic has gradually disappeared until it has become an anecdote. gives the impression that no one really had fun making this movie or believed in it. In the end, it seems more like the result of a meeting in which the sales agents have analyzed what is successful and what is not, and this tape is nothing more than the conclusion of that analysis. He won’t go down in history, but he didn’t deserve this knockout with a clenched fist either.