Disney’s Strange World reverts back to classic production styles, akin to pulp fiction, promising nostalgia and an adventure into the beyond. Following a family of explorers, The Clades, who venture into the unknown after attempting a mission to save a plant power source that Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovered many years ago.
Strange World primarily focuses on a father, son and grandfather relationship and that’s what convinced producer Roy Conli to make it. “When Don Hall [director] pitched the story, it was that aspect of it that I really loved. By putting in that third generation it had a great twist. Then when you start looking at the world and the world has something no one has seen before. Being involved with that was really thrilling,” he explains.
Inspired by the pulp fiction works of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells, Hall and Conli also set out to make a fresh story about explorers, as “a story about explorers who stumbled upon a hidden world really excited him [Hall]. And he thought in animation that had never really been done.”
While the film draws on classic elements, famed from when the studio first began, Disney thrives on pushing the industry with each project but not always through changing its entire identity. For Conli, it’s about maintaining Disney’s legacy in hand-drawn animation. “One of our heads of animation was Glen Keane. He’s probably the premier hand-drawn artist in the world, certainly for the last part of the 20th century and he infused a certain part of that DNA into what we do. One of the things that we were looking at when we were playing with animation tests was the idea that explored the 1950s classic style of Disney.” This is integrated into the film as styles change with each generation and by reverting back to an original approach with a twist, it’s an “update” on the legacy.
This project reunites various creatives from Disney’s pool and Conli considers that it’s almost like “a repertory company in a certain sense.” With many of them hailing from projects like Big Hero Six and Tangled. “Working with Disney is really wonderful, because you’re working with people who you know, but it’s always a different mix,” he says. “It’s always a different cocktail.”
Unlike some of Conli’s previous projects such as Big Hero 6 and Treasure Planet, which had some form of source material they’re based on, Strange World is a standalone story. That offers infinite possibilities creatively and so it’s vital to have the right team behind you that can feed into the project. Creating a colour palette for each location for instance – such as warm tones for Avalonia (where the characters embark) and cool hues for the Clade farm – means the audience can go on a visual journey simultaneous with character development. While praising the visual development team in particular, who are “the most incredibly brilliant visual artists”, the producer admits they are all “perceptive” and “watch for nuance”. Strange World plays with physics and infuses a world that resembles ours with infinite possibilities, so having a crew that understands animation unlike no other was crucial.
Part of enriching this world and offering that sense of escapism was creating an immersive setting, for Strange World that started with the creatures. While they’re fictional, as with many sci-fi projects, the components are rooted in real life. Conli explains that they were “really inspired from multiple sources.” Upon mentioning that they resemble creatures of the ocean Conli responds: “I do think your perception is correct as there was one creature based on a jellyfish. There’s another creature that was based on a microscopic fungus!”
For this art form, each stage of production blur into each other and Conli admits it’s a “wonderful” part of the process. From design, casting and physical effects “you’re always looking for what’s new and different.” Don Hall had a strong vision for this project and Conli applauds Hall and Qui Nguyen (co-director and writer) for their “phenomenal” ability to balance levity in their work, as in his view: “For the adventure genre, I really think comedy is key. If you look at those great adventure films from the Eighties, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or even Star Wars, for that matter, it’s those humour moments that break the tension. That’s what storytelling is about.”
Many of Conli’s projects have gone onto spin-offs and having just finished working on the Baymax series, he says it was a “delight to return to Big Hero Six.” So although the acclaimed producer enjoys new projects – he admits he’s never worked on a film sequel for this reason – he isn’t ruling out returning to Strange World: “We’ll see what happens once the film is out,” he tells us.
It’s clear Conli lives and breathes his work and it did not go unnoticed how much credit he gives to his crew, which is a great testament to his success at Disney Animation.
Strange World releases exclusively in cinemas on 23 November.
