Strange World

Ashia R:

THE TROUBLE IS, I got my hopes too high for ‘Strange World.’

After lots of rave reviews from my biracial parent friends and GayTikTok, in addition to conspiratorial articles about how Disney finally let a gay character out of the closet, I went in thinking this was gonna be mind-blowing.

Instead I’m just kinda now realizing how we’re still digging a hole to set the bar?

While yeah you can find hundreds of articles about how this is Disney’s MOST INCLUSIVE STORY EVER – I’m gonna have to be the nitpicky friend who ruins everything and draw our attention to the fact that this small handful of racially diverse characters ultimately serve as a backdrop for the hero’s journey of World’s-Okayest-White-Father as he grapples with his own daddy issues.

We open in an alternative dimension or whatever – in the valley village of Avalonia, where everyone is walled in by a circle of formidable, impassable mountains.

So – this shouldn’t be a big deal – but it is – Searcher’s son Ethan is both biracial (white/Black) and gay. In addition to this MILESTONE IN DIVERSITY, we’ve also got Searcher’s friend and childhood colleague – Strong–Asian-Woman-Leader and Searcher’s wife (and Ethan’s mom) and Mechanically-Proficient-Short-&-Curvy-Affable-Black-Woman. There are also some minor brown characters who play no instrumental role other than a few lines for laughs.

According to Disney I guess this is the Pinnacle of Intersectional Representation. Again – this is the story of a white man, his white dad, and, to a much smaller extent, his biracial Gay Black son. This is still a story about a white man, centering women and people of color around a white man for his ultimate journey of self-discovery.

Like 80% of me wants to hold back – after all, Thirteen Years Ago Disney gave us a few minutes with a Black princess before she turned into a frog!

Plus we had Raya and the Last Dragon (which…meh)! And Encanto! And Moana! And Big Hero 6!

What right do we have to complain when Disney’s animal studio has been barfing out Black and brown characters left and right at a… well, still a very slow pace outmatched by white-centered movies like Lightyear, Frozen, two movies about a toxic friendship between two insufferable videogame characters, and Zootopia.

Even if the numbers were balanced (they’re not) the centering of whiteness is still so… not great? So with that, I think we still have a right to demand both adequate visual and cultural representation.

First – what folks are excited about in this movie. Ethan – Searcher’s gay, biracial son. He’s here, he’s queer, and everyone is so weirdly interested in his love life and also okay with it in a way that feels a little off.

You’ve probably heard me call for a 12:1 (that number is completely pulled out of my ass, but it feels right) ratio of normalizing stories for characters who aren’t define by their ‘otherness’ with stories about targeted identities that destigmatize, celebrate, unpack problematic stereotypes, in addition to those that validate the lived experience of targeted kids.

And this movie is clearly an attempt at that. A clumsy, entry-level one. Normalization without erasure requires a delicate precision. How do we acknowledge a person with a targeted identity, allow them to journey through a story without being solely defined by that identity – without completely erasing their lived experience, the historical and current stigmatization and hurdles they experience?

How do we increase under-represented kids in our stories without having them move through the story like a white person, and just painting them brown?

Before we get back to Ethan, a quick story.

When I was about 15, a friend of mine came out as a lesbian. For her, this was a BIG DEAL. So when I was like “ok cool,” and kept eating my lunch – it threw her.

‘Cause while I grew up surrounded by gay folks and didn’t understand that gayness wasn’t just another default, she didn’t. For my friend, being gay was a Very Big Deal, and it took courage for her to come out and tell her friends. So understandably, she found my nonchalant response unexplainably discomforting. She wanted me to acknowledge that this was big, her telling me was big, and she wanted some validation that what she was doing was serious.

Back to Strange World.

Yes – this movie is clearly an animated story set in an alternative universe where racial discrimination and homophobia aren’t a thing. But this movie is written for an audience for whom both of these things are Very Big Deals. 

So when Ethan talks about his crush, Diezo, this isn’t just characters chit-chatting about puppy love. And because of who the audience is, the way both his father and grandfather both focus on Ethan’s love life (weird for men in their 40’s and 70’s) and how they don’t blink at Ethan’s emerging pansexual romance feels forced. 

The script both inserts dialogue about Ethan’s love life that feel tacked onto the plot, and attempt to make his grandfather and father’s acceptance a non-issue explicitly because it IS an issue for us as the audience.

The slotted-in dialogue about crushes feels forced and contrived, because it is. For a very small minority of queer kids, this is their lived experience talking about crushes with their dads and grandads (again, is this a white dad thing?) is normal and accepted. But for the vast majority – there are at least a few awkward beats as even the most open-minded grandpa reconfigures his assumptions before responding.

Even Nathan, our resident World’s-Best-White-Father pointed out how it felt like the writers set up the audience to expect some level of conflict or hesitation from the grandfather upon Ethan’s gay reveal.

Instead of sweet (which I totally understand they were going for!), the response comes across as a “gotcha” moment rather than a genuine portrayal of normalized cultural acceptance. The handling of this plot point feels less like a normalization of LGBTQ+ identities and more like a self-congratulatory pat on the back for the writers, as if they are saying “look at us, we made a gay biracial kid a totally normal part of the story” 

And maybe “Here’s a quiet consolation prize for keeping Elsa the Merchandising Queen in the closet so we can keep making money selling her shit to conservative Christians.”

This is all to say – I don’t think Disney needed to keep it super low-key like Katie’s girlfriend reveal in ‘Mitchells Versus The Machines.’ (cough cough: Katie is also multiracial in a super rare representation of a second-generation multiracial family, normalizing the Mitchells’ experience with less HERE IS SOME DIVERSITY IN YOUR FACE pats on the back.)  

I like that Ethan’s dad and grandpa are totally unfazed by his queerness. I’m just… there’s something icky and clumsy about the way the dialogue and scenes reveal it.

Now, beyond the two tacked-on conversations about his crush, Ethan’s Queer, Black, biracial identity affects him in absolutely no way. Ethan is, for all intents and purposes, a gay white boy painted brown (albeit voiced by a biracial Black actor, at least.) As any BIPOC of the rainbow mafia can tell you – our experiences are very, very different than those of our white counterparts. And Ethan’s story feels very, very white.

Meanwhile – Ethan’s gender-bending boyfriend Diezo gets less than 3 minutes of screen time and a few forgettable lines. 

While the casting (FINALLY) focuses on #OwnVoices actors, this should be the bare basics of casting in 2022, and does not deserve our applause.

As for disability: in addition to the 3-legged dog (in the credits it says Legend plays ‘himself’ but given what I can find I’m prettu sure he’s not voiced by a real 3-legged Bernedoodle named Legend at all.)

I heard there was a wheelchair user in the movie, but I guess I blinked? So I never actually saw them. 

Seriously – I heard there was a wheelchair user, voiced by a real wheelchair user! I was looking forward to seeing them! But apparently I missed (according to IMDB) ‘Client #4’ and whatever little screen time and/or dialogue they got.

Dude – if our biggest representation is a 3-legged dog and the disabled humans are that easy to miss in a movie, that’s not representation.

But this has been a dudefest so far. Let’s move on to the Strong Female Characters! (ugh.)

As I mentioned earlier – while the story does feature two suspiciously cool women of color, they unfortunately fall HARD into the “strong female character” trope. Not fully fleshed out, nor particularly interesting – they serve as our pre-requisite flat, dimensionless characters to scaffold Mediocre-White-Dad, Searcher Clade’s journey of self-discovery. 

Aside from the bare minimum of ‘quirky’ character stats, their stories and motivations are completely overshadowed by Searcher.

Strong–Asian-Woman-Leader, Callisto, is a visual feast dismantling stereotypes about submissive, alabaster-fragile Cartoon Chinese women. 

This isn’t surprising from the visual creators of Raya and the Last Dragon. It is, however, basically the same character Michelle Yeoh was forced to play in every role before 2022. While yes, she is a leader, she’s giving off Tiger Mom vibes in the cold decision to lock up her friends to ‘protect her people’ because ‘she knows best.’ And while it’s great that she’s good with a blade in hand-to-hand combat with monsters, she’s basically a disposable background character with no personality, needs, or complicated feelings, thrown in for diversity.

On to Ethan’s mom Meridian – Mechanically-Proficient-Short-&-Curvy-Affable-Black-Woman. 

There’s an awkward scene where Callisto is like ‘Oh hey you like flying & fixing space airplanes’ (or something like that). And Meridian is like ‘YUP I love flying! And my family! And flying my family!’

Because heaven forbid a woman be allowed to really love her job and expertise without qualifying it with ‘BUT ALSO DON’T BE THREATENED – I STILL LOVE MY FAMILY FIRST!’

Like if you flipped this on a white dad mechanic – you wouldn’t hear him be like “Oh yes I love fixing up 1980’s corvettes BUT ALSO I LOVE MY FAMILY.”

No, you wouldn’t, because THAT WOULD BE SO WEIRD. What a weird way to talk! What a strange, unnecessary thing to add to the conversation about your career and hobbies!

A white dude character wouldn’t be called on to insert that strange nonsense because we can still like and respect him even if he’s not 24/7 fixated on caring for his kids.

So if both of these women sound like the old job about Women Written By Men, that’s because they are. A white man and an Asian man, specifically, so that explains the erasure of Ethan’s bizarrely evasive experience as a gay black kid as well.

Oh, in addition to Callisto and Meridian, there are also some minor brown characters who play no instrumental role in the plot, other than a few goofy jokes and laughs.

So like – I’m glad they’re…in the movie. I’m glad Disney’s still trying. Although honestly I’m pretty sure they’re only trying because they ran the numbers, and the illusion of diverse representation is more profitable than none at all.

While the whole thing feels forced and unnecessarily complicated, there’s some nice stuff about generational conflicts, not dumping our childhood baggage on our kids, and an Obligatory 2022 Hamfisted Statement on Saving Our Living Planet. (This movie is to anti-speciesism as Zootopia is to racism, that’s all the energy I’m willing to waste on that.)

At the end of the movie, Searcher is holding a ‘Pretty Good Dad’ mug. Which honestly, I very much want for myself, #MerchandisingWin. But it’s also kind of an oblivious, unintentionally ironic highlight to how very low we’ve set the bar for representation in movies and how much we applaud mediocre characters and the mediocre men who create them.

It’s a pretty good movie. It’s… 2022’s ‘Okayest Movie.’

We deserve more, we need more – we even could have access to more if the same folks who created Owl House had the budget and power of a Full Theater Experience Disney Movie!

But I guess we’re gonna settle for (and oh lord – applaud) this is a cardboard cutout of QPOC characters tangentially revolving around white men. Meh.