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.<\/p>\r\n
The movie also features beautiful and colorful fictional fauna, kind of like a cross between Avatar<\/cite> and Scavengers Reign<\/cite>. And an ecological lesson about the perils of monoculture farming.<\/p>\r\n Also, Gabrielle Union and Lucy Liu play prominent roles.<\/p>\r\n \u2026Unfortunately, they\u2019re all stuck in a movie about what I sometimes sarcastically call The Only Story Worth Telling: A man\u2019s 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\u2019s difficult relationship with his father and<\/em> about that father\u2019s difficult relationship with his own father.)<\/p>\r\n The movie is Strange World<\/cite> (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 \u201ca really toxic way to start a relationship,\u201d etc. And I enjoyed his mom, Meridian (the Gabrielle Union character), who\u2019s an airship pilot and says things like \u201cWhat is a weed other than a plant growing somewhere that you<\/em> find inconvenient?\u201d And I even enjoyed some aspects of Ethan\u2019s dad, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhall), notably Searcher\u2019s interactions with Meridian\u2014they clearly adore each other. (There\u2019s a lovely scene of the two of them dancing in the kitchen as they cook food together.)<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019t.<\/p>\r\n (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\u2019t really as stifling to the rest of the movie as I felt like it was.)<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019s title was Strange World<\/cite> (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\u2019t realized that the reason for that was that there were two 1950s comic-book series called Strange Worlds<\/cite>, 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 \u201cIndiana Jones meets National Lampoon\u2019s Vacation\u201d (with \u201cenvironmental overtones\u201d). In retrospect, I can see that that\u2019s what they might\u2019ve 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\u2019t have occurred to me that the movie was originally intended to be an homage to pulp adventure.<\/p>\r\n 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.<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019s love interest had been onscreen for more than about a minute total.<\/p>\r\n 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.<\/p>\r\n I doubt that that was what was intended, but if it wasn\u2019t, I\u2019m not sure what they intended.<\/p>\r\n Traditionally the categories of literary conflict are described as \u201cman vs man,\u201d \u201cman vs nature,\u201d and \u201cman vs himself.\u201d<\/p>\r\n But given how common it is, I feel like \u201cman vs dad\u201d should get its own category.<\/p>\r\n
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