An average movie

Since this movie had been a huge box office failure, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from it but I have watched pretty much all the animated features from Disney and, since this one was now available on Disney+, I thought I might as well check it out after all. Well, after watching the damned thing, I’m not surprised nobody really cared for it when it was released. I will go more into details later but, basically, it was the most half-baked project that they had released in quite some time. However, the big difference with something like ‘Chicken Little’ for example is that the damned thing actually had some potential. Indeed, to deliver an old-fashioned adventure feature called ‘Strange World’ about discovering, well, some strange world could have been actually really neat. However, the road to this big discover was just way too cumbersome and, above all, barely entertaining whatsoever. Let’s see, they did start with some classic exploring expedition but, then, at some point, the leader and his son got into some argument and the son went back home to investigate some plant they found during their journey. This plant actually turned out to be some kind of energy source which drastically changed their world but, then, it got sick and the son had to go back to some expedition to fix this miracle plant. Well, all this boring stuff took pretty much half of the duration and, at this point, there was still no sight of this wonderous ‘strange world’. As you can imagine, they was also some family drama going over 3 generations (the explorer, his son and his grandson) but it didn’t fit at all within such an adventure tale. Finally, to make the whole thing even more random and scattered, the grandson turned out to be openly gay, which was quite a milestone for Disney, but it was just dropped there without any focus on it whatsoever and I’m still not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that all the characters acted as if being gay was the most normal thing in the world. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was really half-baked, it was actually visually pretty neat and I don’t think it is actually their worst animated feature but, with such a concept, it could and probably should have been much better.

6/10