Strange World

 All of humanity is confined to a single city -Avalonia- ringed by impassable mountains. The city's premier adventurer and explorer, Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid) tirelessly mounts expeditions with his son trying to find a way around them, as chronicled in one of the movie's highpoints - a very funny song that finds Jaeger endlessly impressive... his son, less so.

 The movie begins with one of these expeditions. Young Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds a plant with weird properties - they discharge something similar to electricity - and insists on taking them back to the city; his father, irate, decides to continue into the mountains. so they separate.

 Cut to twenty-five years later. Searcher has revolutionized life for Avalonia when his plants turned out to be a powerful and renewable energy source, and he's now farming them, with a family of his own (his wife is played by Gabrielle Union, and his son by Jaboukie Young-White.) His father never made it back from the mountains.

 Life is good... until a some sort of malady starts affecting the electric plants (geddit?) Some scientists realize that all of their roots converge together and lead ever downwards; so an expedition is mounted by Avalonia's president (Lucy Liu) into a sinkhole that ends up leading into a candy-colored underworld.

 This underland is the main attraction in the movie - a beautifully rendered place, all pinks, reds, and oranges, full of weird plants, creatures, and striking vistas. Because we're operating in cartoon logic here, as soon as Searcher arrives he quickly reunites with his father, who's been stranded there all these years. So the three generations of Clade scions continue tracking the roots to see what lies at the heart of the corruption in this, wait for it, strange world.

 The conflict at the heart of the movie is, unfortunately, much more pedestrian: Jaeger wanted his son to be an explorer like him and is disappointed when he learns he became a farmer. Searcher, in turn, is desperate for his son not to become like Jaeger. Rote lessons will be learnt.

 Strange Word is another entry into Disney's recent string of nice but weirdly unmemorable movies. Not for lack of trying, though; Technically, it's amazing, and its art direction is top-notch, with cute, funny character designs and some impressive effects work (there's some fluffy cloud creatures that looked pretty cool.) There's also a cool twist lurking as to the nature of the strange world and how it plays into the plot. Unfortunately the characters are front and center, and |their arcs are didactic, plain and wholly predictable. Their conflict is so easily resolved it barely registers.

 And it does pointedly tick all the boxes people accuse Disney of ticking these days, for those keeping track at home; I'm sure it will propel a thousand 'think' pieces and trigger the usual crowd, but mostly it feels tired and... not insincere, but, well, almost. Algorithmic.

 Let it be known that in the ancestral cultural divide between Eurogames and (whatever the word for non Eurogames is), Disney have picked a side. The culture wars continue. The world at large shrugs.