For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our interview with Don Hall and Qui Nguyen about Disney Animation’s Strange World from Backstory Magazine’s issue 48 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Director Don Hall and co-director/writer Qui Nguyen on Disney’s pulp-inspired feature that deals with father-son dynamics and the environment.
By Danny Munso
Growing up the son of a farmer in Iowa, Don Hall’s career path seemed preordained. He would work alongside his father as a farmer and eventually keep the family business going on his own. There was just one hitch: Hall had dreams of being an animator. And expectations aside, that’s indeed where he veered, becoming one of the most important voices and filmmakers at Walt Disney Animation Studios—and a two-time Oscar nominee, one time winner—a place he has worked for the past 25 years. After completing his turn as co-director of the2016 instant classic Moana, Hall began searching for his next idea. His mind wandered toward his own past and the future of his children. “I’m very fortunate to be in the position to say, Okay, what’s next?” he notes. “My kids were on my mind. I was thinking about what kind of world they’re inheriting and what kind of world I inherited from my dad. I really wanted to tell a story about the environment and make an animated film that speaks to environmental issues.”
Fleshing out his idea privately, he knew he didn’t want to make a preachy film. After all, the project would still be an animated film from Disney, so it had to be entertaining. “I didn’t want it to be heavy-handed,” Hall says. “I thought a good delivery device for that type of story could be a big adventure story like King Kong or Journey to the Center of the Earth, where a group of explorers finds a hidden world full of fantastical creatures. I thought those two elements would be a good mixture. And because it was based on my kids and my dad, I thought it would be interesting if it was a generational story that spoke to fathers and sons. That gave it a little bit more of an emotional hook than just an environmental story. That’s where it started.” In 2018, Hall was far enough along in development to bring in a writer to help him flesh out his vision. Enter Qui Nguyen, the acclaimed playwright who had started to transition to Hollywood but was new to the world of animation. Nguyen quickly penned a first draft based on Hall’s story that Hall deemed brilliant, and they set up the production’s first development screening, where storyboards of the film are shown to see where more work needs to be done. Then just as Strange World was beginning to take off, the whole production was grounded.
When another project at Disney Animation—Raya and the Last Dragon—found itself in serious jeopardy, the studio’s chief creative officer, Jennifer Lee, asked Hall and Nguyen to put their own project on hold and help come save it. Strange World was benched for over 18 months—an unprecedented move at the studio—as Hall co-helmed Rayawith Carlos López Estrada and Nguyen reworked the script with co-writer Adele Lim. Despite the behind-the-scenes turmoil, Lee’s gambit paid off, and Raya and the Last Dragon became one of the strongest Disney Animation films of this century. But the second their work on that film ended, Hall and Nguyen returned to Strange World. “We had to do it,” Hall says. “If I was a better multitasker, we maybe could have kept both things going, but I can only focus on one thing.” While Hall can be forgiven for not being able to direct two animated features simultaneously, it did create an intense time crunch for the creative team. “The bulk of the art and look of the film, the character designs, the world—all of that came when we came back after Raya. It’s a testament to our amazing crew because they were able to cram into two years what generally takes place over four years. It’s a testament to everybody and their talent.” Nguyen was confident that putting Strange World on pause would ultimately work because of what was already in place when they pivoted projects. “After our first screening [of Strange World], the structure was the structure,” he says. “What you see onscreen, that even existed before I came on. Don had already pitched out the general shape. Everything was already there, so when Jen asked us to move over to Raya, we luckily had the story down in a pretty strong place. That’s what gave us confidence to leave it for a year and a half.”
Strange World opens with the latest expedition undertaken by famous explorer Jaeger Clade (voiced by Dennis Quaid). On it, his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers a luminescent plant called pando that can aid their land of Avalonia. Jaeger doesn’t see its value and instead presses on alone and becomes lost. Twenty-five years later, Searcher is a farmer who harvests pando, which creates energy for their entire world, working alongside wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) and son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). One day their farm is visited by President Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu) of Avalonia, who recruits Searcher to set off on an expedition to discover why pando’s power may be weakening. Ethan secretly wants to be an explorer himself and begs to come along, but Searcher declines. But Ethan stows aboard Callisto’s ship anyway, and when Meridian comes to fetch him, the Clade family is thrust into a new adventure when their ship steers into a hidden world that would hold the key to their future.
Warning: Do not proceed unless you have seen Strange World, as major plot points are discussed
Strange World’s narrative actually contains two major secrets. One is perhaps not a surprise: When the Clade family discovers the hidden world, they also find the lost—and very much alive—Jaeger. The second twist is a doozy and isn’t revealed until the film’s third act. It turns out the entire civilization of Avalonia exists on the back of a giant creature, and the hidden world the Clades get thrust into is the creature’s insides. Furthermore, pando is in fact threatening the creature’s existence, much like a virus can do to humans. It’s a big, bold idea and one that Hall had in mind from the story’s very outset. “The two pieces of art I drew for my initial pitch were a painting of a big, giant turtle creature, with mountains on its shell and a giant eyeball with a tiny character dangling on a rope in front of it,” he says. “That was all in the DNA of the story. The idea of going inside the body of this creature was interesting and enticing.” Hall and the creative team began to look at microscopic imagery of the human body, both for visual reference and for story ideas. Indeed, many of the creatures and locations in this hidden world the Clades visit is based on our own real immune systems. “King Kong is one of the more famous examples of this kind of story, where a group of explorers finds a hidden world populated by prehistoric creatures,” Hall says. “But I thought the parallel of the immune system being those creatures was really interesting, so we did a deep dive into the immune system and its function.”
Early on in this mysterious world, Ethan encounters a blue, faceless organism he calls Splat, one of the breakout characters in the film. Ethan thinks Splat is helping him, but he is actually trying to lure the boy to a group of creatures called the reapers. To them, Ethan and the rest of the Clades are a cancer of sorts and a threat to the immune system of the massive creature they inhabit. “They’re all based on real parts of the immune system,” Hall says. “Splat is a dendritic cell, and the function of that is to suss out friend from foe. They go and touch something, and if they feel like it’s an enemy, they go get these things called macrophages [a type of white blood cell] that are the reapers in our story. I just thought all of that could be really cool. I think everybody got excited in doing an imaginative spin on this world and those creatures. Part of that was turning our artists loose to go crazy.”
As Hall discovered while conceiving the story, as enthralling as the world and the reveal are, Strange World would need an emotional backbone, and he found one in the intergenerational father-son stories of Jaeger, Searcher and Ethan. The dynamics each has with the others are completely different. Where Jaeger and Searcher are more combative with each other, there is nothing but love between Searcher and Ethan. But as in all families, that doesn’t mean tension doesn’t exist. Searcher thinks Ethan is going to take the farm from him, but Ethan’s heart lies elsewhere. It is the story of Hall and his own father. “Ethan’s story is very much my story,” Hall says. “I was being trained to be a farmer, and there was no discussion. It was just this expectation. I had to basically say, This is not me. I have this other thing I want to pursue. My dad is definitely a lot like Searcher. He’s a very humble, affable man. We didn’t have a big, dramatic outburst like in the film, but that part of the movie is very much based on a real thing.”
Hall and Nguyen are both fathers themselves, and though it’s easy to see how they connect with Searcher and Ethan, there are large pieces of both men in all three of the main characters. That includes Jaeger, who leaves young Searcher behind to continue his wild expeditions. “We relate so much to all of them,” Nguyen says. “It’s so easy to vilify Jaeger, but in a lot of ways, he’s a lot like me and Don. We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing and making these movies if at some point we didn’t have the same ambitious spirit of chasing horizons we can’t possibly get to. In a lot of ways, we’re sacrificing time with our families by doing so. Likewise with Searcher—he’s the dad Don and I are to our kids. We have a good relationship with our kids, and we are reactions to our dads. And we’re both Ethan. We wouldn’t have this movie if Don didn’t have that moment with his dad, who he loves a lot but says, I’m not going to be a farmer. As much as you love your parents, you have to cut your own path.”
One thing the filmmakers struggled with in the construction of the three characters was calibrating parameters of the overlapping relationships in a way that didn’t overtake the point of the film. Although Ethan and Jaeger are integral to the tale, Strange World is Searcher’s story, and Hall admits that got muddied from time to time throughout their development screenings. “Ethan as a character came out fully formed, but what took some manipulation and subtlety in the writing was how much we frontload the fact that he is bristling under the idea of inheriting this legacy from his father that he may not want?” Hall says. “How much do we tell the audience at the beginning that Ethan is burdened with this? The more we frontload it and the more Searcher is unaware of it, that slowly made it Ethan’s story, and we didn’t want that. That took a lot of story construction on Qui’s part, and we’re very fortunate that we have this screening cycle. It seemed like with every screening, that was a little dial we were moving each time.”
Every Disney Animation film has a large supporting cast, and Strange World is no different. In addition to the three leads, Hall and Nguyen give plenty of screen time to the women in the story, particularly Meridian, who shares the best scene in the film with Ethan aboard their airship. Splat, too, has become a breakout star of the film and a sure merchandising hit. Then there is Legend, the Clades’ three-legged dog who becomes quite a scene-stealer. Legend was a late addition to the story process and came about because of the looming presence of Burny Mattinson in the Strange World story room. Simply put, Mattinson is a Disney Animation icon. He signed on in 1955 and went on to contribute significantly to every film the studio produced since. At the incredible age of 87, he is the longest-serving employee at the Walt Disney Company and is still contributing to Disney Animation, particularly those films directed by Hall, who counts Mattinson as a mentor. And on Strange World, Mattinson was insistent that the film have a dog. “The story crew essentially ganged up on me and demanded we have a dog in the movie,” Hall laughs. Head of story Lissa Treiman quickly drew up a three-legged dog, and that was that. Legend is even named after Burny, as Mattinson was honored with the Disney Legend Award in 2008. Hall clearly gets a kick that he still gets to work alongside one of his animation heroes. “I love him to death, but he takes me to task. And I listen every time. I respect him and love him so dearly.”
All told, Strange World is one of the more personal films released by Disney in recent memory. All filmmakers have a personal connection to the stories they tell but none quite so personal as Hall’s with this film: He shared his own story and his family’s onscreen. Nguyen has an interesting perspective on his role as the screenwriter and how this film contrasted with his co-writing on Raya, where he and Lim were both putting their heritage onscreen. “Raya was me exploring myself,” Nguyen says. “It was, What do I need to tell the world? because the story means a lot to me as a Southeast Asian person. When I went back to Strange World, it was, What does Don need to tell the world? It’s a love letter for both of us to our dads and our kids. But it’s also Don’s love letter to the things he grew up with, these pulp adventures, these kinds of heroes, his family and [his reverence of] the environment. When you have a director who can inspire 450 crew members to get behind his vision, that’s a real gift. We had a really good North Star, and that was Don Hall. Sometimes making big films, it’s hard to maintain a personal story, but when I look at that screen, I see the reflection of the artist and person Don is and, for me as an artist, it’s the most gratifying aspect of getting to be a part of this project.”
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