Viewers of the new animated Disney film “Strange World” may wonder what percentage of the adults in the theater didn’t understand that the story was about oil. The animation is up to Disney standards, so the movie will look good to everyone. But how many of its parent customers will recognize it is lobbying them?
Half of them, maybe? The movie’s protagonist, Searcher Clade, is a farmer who harvests fruit that provides the power for everything in his small and confined city-state. Then the fruit stops yielding a decent amount of go.
So the Clade family takes a journey to the center of the earth to find and neutralize whatever it is that is impeding the flow of plant nutrients through the gigantic root system. The party, one notes, is led by Callisto Mai (with the voice of Lucy Liu), the society’s political leader.
What they discover flips their preconceptions. The energy plants that, among other things, make the expedition’s air ship move are actually bad. But not for any practical reason. The movie’s metaphor is dismissed here in favor of the old cliché about everything having a heart.
Because, see, in the filmmaker’s world view, evil oil is strangling the heart of something important. Partly because the thing the roots are strangling are underground, the identity of the thing being strangled isn’t going to be clear.
That’s one reason ticket-holders may not be sure their fellows have seen that the movie is a shot at oil use. There’s another reason they may not get it.
There are folks convinced that the world is going to suffer greatly because of changes to the atmosphere caused by discharges from the consumption of petroleum products. They tend to be in favor of top down solutions to this problem, with the government discouraging or forbidding the use of gasoline, natural gas, and coal as power sources.
And there is that government symbol in “Strange World,” Callisto Mai. But she doesn’t solve the problem in the film. In fact, she is a drag on the resolution of the problem. Moreover, government fans usually aren’t enthusiastic about wild-eyed pathfinder types who attack the unknown with weapons and who trespass into alien territory.
But the movie’s hero is the long-missing head of the famous Clade clan, Jaeger (Dennis Quaid). Even his much-more-passive son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) throws himself into attack mode, ignoring his leader’s injunction, in order to resolve the story’s problem.
Here we have one of the huge recurring problems for a political Hollywood. The passive and conciliatory methods currently favored by their ideological tribe makes for lousy story-telling. Holding hands in a circle doesn’t get the forest fire stopped.
Naturally “Strange World” has to give us an afterword passage to assure us that all the characters can get along all right without the power fruit. Apparently the zots produce is replaced with Texas’s windmill power system. And this all leads to another viewer question.
What messages is a movie like this selling to children? Well, they are too young to buy the economics of the argument. And they are probably too sophisticated to feel the story works out right, even though it does have the patented Disney sentimental passage at the start of the last reel.
