Strange World
The other day, I watched an animated Disney movie featuring a casually gay teenage lead character who has a Black mother and a white father, and whose hobby is playing an ecology-themed boardgame.
The movie also features beautiful and colorful fictional fauna, kind of like a cross between Avatar and Scavengers Reign. And an ecological lesson about the perils of monoculture farming.
Also, Gabrielle Union and Lucy Liu play prominent roles.
…Unfortunately, they’re all stuck in a movie about what I sometimes sarcastically call The Only Story Worth Telling: A man’s difficult relationship with his father. Sigh. (In this case, that story is presumably doubly worth telling, because the movie is both about a teenage boy’s difficult relationship with his father and about that father’s difficult relationship with his own father.)
The movie is Strange World (2022). I really enjoyed several of the parts about Ethan (the teenager, played by Jaboukie Young-White, who is of Jamaican descent): his awkward crush, his enthusiasm about boardgames and ecology, his curiosity, his befriending a particular creature, his awareness that the approach to romance recommended by another character would be “a really toxic way to start a relationship,” etc. And I enjoyed his mom, Meridian (the Gabrielle Union character), who’s an airship pilot and says things like “What is a weed other than a plant growing somewhere that you find inconvenient?” And I even enjoyed some aspects of Ethan’s dad, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhall), notably Searcher’s interactions with Meridian—they clearly adore each other. (There’s a lovely scene of the two of them dancing in the kitchen as they cook food together.)
So I would love to see a movie in which Ethan and his mom fly around exploring a new environment and encountering nifty alien lifeforms, and I kept wanting this movie to be that movie, and parts of it were, but most of it wasn’t.
(I felt like most of the movie was the Man Vs. Dad story/ies, but I tend to be particularly annoyed by that storyline, so maybe it wasn’t really as stifling to the rest of the movie as I felt like it was.)
There was also another aspect of the movie that I was mostly unaware of until I read Wikipedia and IMDB after I finished watching: the PULP ADVENTURE! part. I had noticed that the movie’s title was Strange World (which seemed like a weak and unevocative title to me), and that that title was presented in a pulp-adventure font (which seemed like a terrible font choice to me); I hadn’t realized that the reason for that was that there were two 1950s comic-book series called Strange Worlds, and that this movie was originally intended to be a pulp adventure movie. Wikipedia says that at one point during development the movie was described as “Indiana Jones meets National Lampoon’s Vacation” (with “environmental overtones”). In retrospect, I can see that that’s what they might’ve been aiming for, but it would not have occurred to me; I felt like the pulp-adventure character was over-the-top enough to be more Othar Tryggvassen than Indiana Jones, and I felt like he was living a pulp adventure while everyone around him was living a more grounded and nuanced experience. So it wouldn’t have occurred to me that the movie was originally intended to be an homage to pulp adventure.
Anyway, I think what a lot of this comes down to is yet another case where the creators of the movie wanted to make a very different movie from the one I wanted to watch.
Side note: Although it is lovely that this movie takes place in a society that apparently has no homophobia at all, it would have been nice if Ethan’s love interest had been onscreen for more than about a minute total.
Other side note: There is a brief moment at the very end of the movie that could be interpreted as hinting toward someone having a poly relationship.
I doubt that that was what was intended, but if it wasn’t, I’m not sure what they intended.
Traditionally the categories of literary conflict are described as “man vs man,” “man vs nature,” and “man vs himself.”
But given how common it is, I feel like “man vs dad” should get its own category.
(Wikipedia notes that some other forms of conflict are sometimes included on the list, such as: “man against society,” “man against machine,” “man against fate,” “man against the supernatural,” and “man against God.”)
(That Wikipedia article doesn’t mention anyone other than “man” who can be in those conflicts, sigh.) (That is, it doesn’t even gesture at gender-neutral terminology. Nor at fiction that doesn’t include any humans.)
(This entry was originally posted on Facebook on October 6, 2024.)