Disney’s Strange World is a colorful, sometimes silly
adventure through an exotic alien landscape
It's definitely a movie that feels geared towards a younger audience
but that doesn't mean its message is childish or shallow
To explain why, let’s jump to the halfway point in the story where
we find our heroes have paused their journey to play a board game called Primal Outpost
Ethan: A little Primal Outpost?
It’s sort of a mashup of Magic The Gathering and Settlers of Catan
but the goal isn’t to defeat monsters or expand territory
Ethan: A daemon spider! Jaeger: Kill it!
Ethan: Ah ah the point is not to kill it.
instead the players are supposed to cooperate to build a better world
Ethan: The objective of Primal Outpost is to live harmoniously with your environment
That goal is also a distillation of the larger message of the movie
There is no Disney villain to defeat. Instead the heroes must convince their society
to abandon the fuel source that powers the comforts and conveniences of their daily lives
before it destroys their world
As far as ecological parables go that’s a surprisingly radical one.
Strange World's visuals are borrowed from old pulp adventure magazines
but its theme has much more in common with solar punk narratives.
Solar punk is a relatively recent artistic, literary, and media trend
that uses science fiction as a lens to tell stories about regenerating ecosystems,
futuristic permaculture farming, mutual aid networks, and sustainable urban living.
The idyllic themes and visuals are evocative of and often inspired by Studio Ghibli films
that predate the term by decades,
especially Castle In the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Nausicaa of the
Valley of the Wind.
At the moment, solar punk is less of a full fledged genre in its own right, and
more of an aspirational idea of a genre. But it's growing rapidly to now include video games.
Game narrator: Use toxin scrubbers to cleanse the soil and sea. Pumps and irrigators
get clean water everywhere it needs to go, allowing the natural greenery to grow.
My favorite example of works explicitly written as part of the solar punk trend
are a pair of novellas by Becky Chambers published as the Monk & Robot series.
At its core solar punk is an optimistic reaction to the cynical dystopian narratives
that saturate much of popular culture wherein hyper-capitalism has thoroughly
ruined the world in one terrible way or another.
At this point most of us have seen so many spectacular global catastrophes that the
end of the world can start to feel both mundane and inevitable.
Robot: You've seen one post-apocalyptic city, you've seen them all.
You might have run across a paraphrased version of this oft quoted passage by author
Fredric Jameson from his 1994 book, The Seeds of Time.
"It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth
and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism..."
"...perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination."
I'd argue that failure of imagination is, at least in part, the fault of an entertainment
industry that keeps churning out stories set in neon-infused corporate dystopias
and devastated post-apocalyptic landscapes,
where the fate of the natural world has already been sealed.
At their best dystopian stories can serve as warnings about the trajectory of our own world.
Ad Announcement: A new life awaits you in the off-world colony. The chance to begin
again in a golden land of opportunity...
But bleak visions of the future have become so ubiquitous
and so defanged of socioeconomic critique, that much of the genre
has been reduced to a series of stylistic choices and narrative cliches.
From time to time, we do see fleeting glimpses of possible better futures momentarily peeking
through in otherwise dystopian settings...
Vi: Is that a real tree?
Ekko: Pretty cool huh? When I first saw it I knew this was the place.
Ekko: If a single seed can male it down here, so could we.
But even those brief visions of ecological sustainability only seem to exist as part of
an impossibly distant future, in some alternate universe, or inside of a virtual simulation
Strange World offers a refreshing break from that pattern
because although the environment is in great peril,
there’s still time to save it.
In the opening scenes we learn Avalonia has progressed from a pre-industrial village society
to a techno-futuristic one thanks to a newly discovered energy source called Pando.
Though grown and harvested like vegetables, Pando is set up as a clear metaphor for fossil fuels.
Searcher: Hmm, Pando battery is dead.
Meridian: That doesn't make any sense, I picked those pods an hour ago.
When Pando begins to mysteriously fail, The Avalonians embark on an expedition
to save their way of life.
Callisto: Our mission is to follow these roots until we reach the heart of Pando...
Callisto: ...and stop whatever's harming it!
They're determined to find a way to keep their fuel flowing.
Even if that means going to war and exterminating an entire alien species.
Since this is an on-the-nose allegory for climate change, it turns out that
Pando is a parasite, which is very literally killing the world.
Ethan: This place is alive. It's a living thing!
Searcher: So, all this time we've been living on the back of this giant creature?
Ethan is the first to make the connection and understand the severity of their situation.
Ethan: And Pando is killing it.
And after convincing his family to join the cause, they all demand change.
Ethan & Searcher: A giant creature! Others: What? A giant creature? You can't be serious.
Searcher: Okay, listen, this place, this world that we live on is a living thing
and Pando is killing it. If we wanna survive Pando has to go.
Others: What? Callisto: You want us to Pando?
Jaeger: They don't know what they saw out there!
But their leaders are dead set on maintaining the status quo, and deny the truth of
what's happening to their ecosystem.
Searcher: Callisto?
Ethan: Dad! Meridian: Get your hands off me!
Callisto: Emotions are running really high right now, and I don't know
what you think you saw, but we came down here to save Pando. That plan hasn't changed.
Searcher: You have no idea what you're doing!
Ethan and his family are even arrested and briefly imprisoned for pointing out
the scientific reality.
Searcher: You're making a big mistake! You can't do this!! You have to listen to me!
The conflict is short-lived and the deniers are soon convinced.
Meridian: Now do you see what we're dealing with? That's a heart.
But the scenario mirrors our own struggles over the environment here in the real world.
Ethan: ---aaaand, times up! Okay, fine. It's dead. See. You killed it.
Jaeger: That's what I'm talking about!
Just like we saw during that game of Primal Outpost, the goal of ecological sustainability
is self-evident to younger people.
Ethan: For the 27th time, there are no bad guys. The objective isn't to kill or destroy
monsters. You're just supposed to build a working civilization utilizing the environment
around you.
But the older generations express confusion and frustration at the idea.
Jaeger: Uh-huh, yeah, I don't get this game. Searcher: Ptth! Me neither.
Ethan: Oh come on! It is not that complicated!
Searcher: No bad guys? What kind of game has no bad guys?
Jaeger: That's just poor storytelling.
Ethan: Okay, you know what? You want bad guys? Fine! You two are the bad guys!
They're stuck in their ways, comfortable in their lifestyle, and they can't fathom making
the sacrifices necessary to solve the crisis.
The real villain in this story isn't a person.
It is instead a rigid worldview that refuses to accept the need for change.
In the end the people of this strange world are convinced to destroy Pando and
give up the creature comforts that it provides in order to save their world.
On one level, this is exactly the type of happy ending we've come to expect in
animated movies--the revelation that the planet and everything living on it
are all interconnected is something we've seen before.
What's different here are the messages about our future and how we get there.
Meridian: Alright, next stop no power, cold coffee, and angry masses!
Meridian: Who's ready to go home?
In most family-friendly movies with environmental themes, saving the earth--
Linda: There are rare birds living around here! You can't cut down these trees!
--is framed in terms of conservation rather than systemic change.
Ted: And we can start by planting this!
And the solution almost always involves promoting some small, personal action
like picking up litter, turning off the lights, or planting a few trees.
Planeteers: Go Planet!
Captain Planet: The Planeteers want you to join them in keeping our planet clean, healthy, and beautiful.
Wheeler: Don't litter! It's completely uncool.
Captain Planet: The power is yours!
This type of message is designed to shift the onus for change away from the large
institutions who are actually at fault and onto individual people.
What makes Strange World so different is that the environment isn't saved as a
result of a bunch of personal choices. It's saved by fundamentally transforming
the way an entire society operates.
They must quit Pando cold-turkey.
The allegory for us in the real world is pointed. We must follow the example of the Avalonians
and stop extracting and burning fossil fuels.
And we can't do it slowly over ten, twenty, or thirty years. The transition to green energy
needs to be immediate.
Contrary to what big energy companies want us to believe, there's no quick technological
fix just around the corner that will stave off climate collapse.
Husband: Smells so clean! Wife: Mm-hm!
Coal Rep: Is regular clean clean enough for your family?
False solutions like clean coal, carbon capture, or hydrogen fuel are just
smoke-and-mirrors greenwashing campaigns meant to distract the public from our
continued investment in dirty energy.
Coal Rep: Clean coal is supported by the coal industry--the most trusted name in coal.
If we really want to save planet Earth, we simply cannot keep producing and consuming
in the wildly unsustainable ways that we do now.
Now of course reorganizing an entire society that's been dependent on harmful energy
will require enduring an uncomfortable inconvenient period of readjustment.
But eras of great transformation can also spark creativity and innovation.
The Avalonians in Strange World don't need to permanently return to an agrarian way of life.
They work through a period of hardship, with no power, and cold coffee, but they do
it together as a community, and eventually start inventing renewable, wind-powered
technology to get the lights back on and the airships flying again.
The optimistic message that ecological harmony is in fact achievable puts
Strange World squarely in the solar punk camp, despite the lack of solar panels
in the story. It is a little ironic that a story about radical environmental
sustainability comes from the Walt Disney company,
though it's not the first time filmmakers have snuck calls for systemic change
into a piece of corporate media.
These clips of a beautifully animated futuristic farm, for example, are part of
a yogurt commercial of all things.
Brands have long tried to associate themselves with visions of the future,
and we can appreciate the rare positive message while also recognizing that
in a truly better world there is simply no place for the corporate structures
and systems that have brought our planet to the brink of annihilation.
When Strange World was released in theaters it faced calls for boycotts from reactionary
pundits who were angry about its diversity and its storyline, where being gay is
framed as a completely normal thing that's no big deal.
Ethan: That's really sweet!
The film's choice to center characters of color is reflective of another critical
element in solar punk world building because it acknowledges that many of
the ideas surrounding sustainable ecology aren't drawn from far-future science fiction
but are instead rooted in African and Indigenous traditions developed
well before Europeans colonized the planet.
Lyla June: By tapping into preexisting natural systems, Native farmers have
been able to cultivate the same plots of land for centuries without ever depleting the soil.
The rise of solar punk media underscores an important truth--
Computer: Mega-restricted area.
--while it is necessary to understand the severity of the climate crisis that we face
grim proclamations of our impending doom aren't enough to spur people to mass action.
Stories that instead helps us envision the kind of future we actually want can be
motivating, inspirational, and, critically, make that better future feel like it's
within our grasp.
Thanks so much for watching!
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