Strange World: Disney Releases New Featurette with the Animated Film's Cast
Strange World is the latest film from Disney Animation Studios, and it's finally coming out this month. The movie includes an impressive voice cast with Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu, and Jaboukie Young-White all leading the film. The adventure story follows a family as they embark on a journey through a mysterious land in the center of their world. Today, Disney released a new featurette with the cast in honor of its upcoming release.
"'It's three generations learning to be okay with everyone charting their own course.' See the Thanksgiving movie event, Disney's #StrangeWorld, only in theaters November 23!" Disney captioned the video. "The feature film introduces a legendary family of explorers, the Clades, as they attempt to navigate an uncharted, treacherous land alongside a motley crew that includes a mischievous blob, a three-legged dog, and a slew of ravenous creatures. 'Inspired by classic adventure stories,' said director Don Hall, Strange World is an original animated adventure/comedy about three generations of the Clade family who overcome their differences while exploring a strange, wondrous, and oftentimes hostile world." The video includes the cast teasing the movie. You can check it out below:
How Does Strange World Differ From Encanto?
ComicBook.com spoke with Strange World's Production Designer, Mehrdad Isvandi, who also served as the Art Director on Encanto. Of course, Encanto took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature earlier this year, and its soundtrack has become one of the most popular in Disney history. While chatting with Isvandi, he spoke about the differences between recreating Columbia in Encanto and a whole new location for Strange World.
"It was a ton of meetings," Isvandi explained when asked about making Strange World vs. Encanto. "Sometimes I was keeping average of meetings per day. It's like 16 meetings per day in Encanto and this one vastly different. Encanto we had a reference of Colombia and we have a reference of the city, we have referenced the plant species on the top of the mountain, in the close beach or this room and this room. We had something to refer to, but this movie, we have something so new and different that we can't use any reference now. But if you don't use any reference, now everything is odd. And all the movie that you're watching you are like, 'Okay, what is that? But are there any rules?' So it was a challenge to shift from Columbia to nowhere."
We also spoke with Sean Jenkins, who served as Head of Environments on Strange World, and he detailed the challenges of creating a world from scratch.
"It's totally its own world that you've never seen before," Jenkins explained. "But yeah, no, it's a real challenge. And ultimately you end up having to try to put some constraints and rules on it because when anything can be anything ... you don't have anything hard to kind of push against to try to figure out what it should be. So I think the early part of the movie was really trying to define the rules of the world. So that then we could then fill in all of the blanks for any of the visual development that's out there."
Strange World opens in theaters on November 23rd.