Disney's Strange World Goes Far Beyond What You See In The Trailers, According To The Directors [Exclusive]
While Disney Animation has pulled back the curtain on what their upcoming feature "Strange World" is all about, there's still quite a bit about the movie that we have yet to see.
We know the movie centers around three generations of the Clade family, who find themselves thrown into a world where everything is alien and nothing is quite what it seems. Specifically, they journey beneath the surface of their planet, and encounter a world that is a bit ... strange. During a press event earlier this month, Disney showed footage that revealed a vibrant pink-hued world full of faceless, boneless creatures that still managed to be adorable (well, some of them).
This sneak peek, however, was only a glimpse of what we'll see of this strange land. I had the chance to talk with "Strange World" director Don Hall as well as co-director/writer Qui Nguyen about the movie during that press event. During that conversation, the two shared (or actively declined to share) additional details about what we'll see in the movie.
Strange World has many strange places we have yet to see
I made the mistake of starting off our conversation by asking whether they knew the creation story for that strange world of the title. Hall's answer was short and to the point: "Yes, we do." I then made my second mistaking by asking whether the audience would find out that story, and was met with stony silence. Read into that what you will.
The conversation fortunately went on from there, and later on in our discussion about the look and feel of that pink-hued place we see in the trailer, Nguyen shared this piece of information about how expansive the strange land the Clades are trapped in is:
"Here's a little spoiler, which I'm probably not supposed to say, but you get the scoop. There's a little bit of a false read to the things that you're looking at. 'Strange World,' the nature of the kind of movie we're making, it's an exploration film that will go travel throughout the whole thing. Right now you get a lot of footage from what we showed you and in our trailers of a very specific spot in the film, that is juicy. They'll be traveling in different places that will again surprise, and are actually quite dramatically different then that area of the film. It moves and changes — some places are juicy, some places are jagged, some places are very different, but it is going to be many different lands. It's a bit of a surprise that we're trying to keep."
While we don't have many details yet, although Production Designer Mehrdad Isvandi did mention a yellow-hued place in my conversation with him, it's exciting to hear that the movie's strange world is strange in many different ways beyond what we have seen.
"Strange World" features the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal as Searcher Clade; Dennis Quaid as Searcher's larger-than-life explorer father, Jaeger; Jaboukie Young-White as Searcher's 16-year-old son, Ethan; Gabrielle Union as Meridian Clade; and Lucy Liu as Callisto Mal, Avalonia's fearless leader.
The movie ventures its way into theaters on November 23, 2022.