Strange World isn't your typical adventure movie. Along with revolving around the complex family dynamics of three generations of fathers and sons, the film also has a lot to say about the environment and is an important reminder of the need to take care of our planet. Total Film met directors Don Hall and Qui Nguyen to talk about the Disney film, and Hall broke down the movie's surprising environmental twist. Major Strange World spoilers ahead!
Although he's the son of legendary explorer Jaeger Clade, Searcher has no interest in exploring and instead turns his discovery of the plant pando into the bedrock of Avalonia's advanced technology. Pando seems too good to be true, considering it's an energy source that grows naturally and can be harvested easily at the Clade farm.
That's because it is too good to be true. As it turns out, Avalonia actually resides on the back of a ginormous turtle, who is serenely swimming the seas. All those weird and wonderful creatures in the strange world are actually part of the turtle's immune system, and they're attacking pando and causing it to die on the surface because the plant is killing the creature. Of course, if the turtle dies, that spells doom for Avalonia, too – so pando is more fossil fuel than utopian renewable energy source. That means the Clade expedition needs to destroy pando and change Avalonia's entire way of living to survive.
"The minute you put a corporation in a movie, you're like, 'They're the bad guy!'" says Hall. "Especially if it was oil, and you're like, 'Okay, I see where this is going.' For us, it was about, 'How do we disguise it and slowly reveal that it's an environmental film?' And so this idea of this miracle plant – it's named after a forest in Utah in America, that I believe is one of the biggest organisms on Earth. It's an aspen forest that is essentially one organism, because it's all connected underground. And that's where the name pando comes from.
"So we just felt like, especially as Searcher discovers it, and then becomes essentially the father of pando, it really puts him front and center at this green energy revolution that then, when it becomes a detriment, he takes on the responsibility of eradicating it," Hall continues. "And so it gave us a bit of a sneaky way to enter our environmental story, as opposed to front-loading it and the audiences rolling their eyes, because they're like, 'I see where this is going.'"
Avalonia's president Callisto Mal isn't on board with the idea of destroying pando, either, which is understandable considering it powers her community. But, as Hall explains, she's not the villain of the movie for a reason. "Another version of this movie is like, she's the CEO of pando, and you're like, 'Okay, I see where this is going.' So it was important for us to shift all that."
For more from our conversation with the directors, check out our full interview with the Strange World filmmakers, as well as producer Roy Conli's thoughts on Disney's shift from hand drawn to CGI animation.
Strange World releases exclusively in theaters on Wednesday, November 23. Get excited for everything else the House of Mouse has in store for us with our guide to all the upcoming Disney movies.
