If you’re a fan of Walt Disney Animation Studios, then you know that research is a big part of every film they make. From research trips to culture trusts, the filmmakers and artists are always rooting fantasy in reality. The same is true of the studio’s 61st animated feature, Strange World, now available to add to your collection on home video. In celebration of today’s release, we had the honor of speaking with two of the film’s scientific consultants, Dr. Elizabeth Rega and Dr. Stuart Sumida, who both appear in a bonus feature titled “Strange Science.” Dr. Stuart Sumida is a Professor of Biology at California State University San Bernardino and Dr. Elizabeth Rega is a Professor of Anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California. Both are heavily sought after for their expertise in Hollywood, with past Disney film consulting projects including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan Tarzan, Brother Bear, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ratatouille, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon. They’ve both also worked with Walt Disney Imagineering on projects including Expedition Everest and updates to The Hall of presidents.
(Disney)
Laughing Place: You both have a long history of working as consultants with Disney. When did you first get involved with Strange World?
Dr. Stuart Sumida: Both Elizabeth and I have a long history with Disney. It goes all the way back to Beauty and the Beast for me and The Lion King for both of us. In a lot of those kinds of projects, what you do is you're brought in to explain the movement of a character or the biomechanics or sometimes fix a problem or help understand the difficulty. Strange World was a very special and exciting opportunity where we were in, at the very beginning, in concept development so that we could brainstorm with the directors and the writers to try and come up with some of the ideas for this strange world.
Laughing Place: The film’s setting is kept a secret until the third act when it’s revealed that Avalonia is on the back of a giant creature. How did you walk that fine line with the filmmakers to make sure that there was scientific accuracy, but that it wasn’t instantly obvious the first time you see the film?
Dr. Elizabeth Rega: You’re focusing on a matter of scale. The earliest discussions were about that idea that you've got that big view where we're looking at caves, but really at a microscopic view, you're looking at insect trachea where in fact that's the respiratory system. So it’s kind of going in and out of scale. And for any of you that have ever used that microscope in 11th-grade biology and used that fine focus, you go up and down the section, and you see different things depending on where your lens is focused. I think that's very much a metaphor for this film.
Laughing Place: How do you think the science behind this movie can inspire folks to take care of our living planet?
Dr. Stuart Sumida: One of the things you'll notice about the main characters in this film is that they sort of mirror the history of how humans have treated the planet. Grandpa Jaeger is very much the humans will tame and use the planet, whereas then we have Searcher, his son, where humans are taking advantage of the plant, they're mining it for resources, and then ultimately the youngest member of the family needs to conserve it. He learns that it's important to conserve it. And so what we see in the Strange World is ecosystem as organism and in parallel, three generations of a family treating this ecosystem organism the way we ought to be thinking about our own planet.
Laughing Place: There's sometimes a false narrative that science and art don't mix, but Disney has proved that wrong for a hundred years. One of the producers of this film, Roy Conli, also produces a lot of Disneynature films. Can you talk a little bit about the collaborative process with the artistry of Walt Disney Animation Studios?
Dr. Elizabeth Rega: That collaborative process between art and science goes back to at least Bambi when the animators dissected a baby deer because there wasn't a resource on deer anatomy for them. Is Bambi realistic? Both yes and no. But do you believe that that is a baby dear learning to walk? Absolutely. You're carried into that story because of their sensitivity and those drawings that they did as observers. We can use it to teach. The bones, the way that that is depicted is absolutely accurate. And that helps us because our opinion is not to be the science police. Good science keeps you in the story and bad science doesn't look right; maybe you don't know why. And so we're working with the artists to help people suspend their disbelief. And ultimately artists, like scientists, have to be really good observers. Some of my favorite lectures are given to animators because they're drawing what I'm showing them on a PowerPoint, and they're observing it, and they're assimilating it, and they make wonderful students and take wonderful notes. But what you don't want to do is belabor it with big words. They don't need to know the big words, they need to know the shapes, they need to know the significance. And so I think with this project and many projects, what we're bringing is a realm of possibilities. We often ask ourselves what-ifs. I know that a human being is not typically raised by gorillas, but if a baby were raised by gorillas, how would that baby behave, how would that baby move? Just as an example.
Laughing Place: For Strange World’s home video release, you both get to appear on-camera in a bonus feature titled “Strange Science,” which makes the educational component very accessible. How did you approach the curriculum of this bonus feature?
Dr. Stuart Sumida: One of the things that's important to us as scientists is we're science educators in the end. But terminology and lingo is an impediment sometimes. We learn how to teach. There's a classic educational concept known as “Teaching Without Terms.” We both teach anatomy. There's a lot of stuff to know. But if you can communicate with artists who are smart and creative without a lot of terminology, that makes us better educators when we turn to our own students. We don't have to spend a month teaching them words, we can start teaching them from day one. And so what happens is that this collaborative behavior that we have with artists enhances our teaching. Now, good teaching is about communication. Animators are excellent communicators. Not all scientists are great communicators. They might do something really important, but they're not really good at telling their story.
Dr. Elizabeth Rega: Yeah, I had that for some time.
Dr. Stuart Sumida: So this is something that's really important to us. And our colleagues ask us, "Why do you spend all the time making movies? Why aren't you writing papers or writing grants?" Because it's helping us explain to people why science is actually so important.
Dr. Elizabeth Rega: And these are people that we want to vote for and make decisions as well as go to Disney films. We think because of the kind of trust relationship and the long history of Disney's narrative, this is an ideal place to bring those concepts to an audience. In a way, I think that illustrates the high quality of the approach. You don't have to do as much research as Disney typically does for its films, but when you do, the product is demonstrably much better.
Laughing Place: For my last question, is there a scientific detail in Strange World, maybe an easter egg or a little touch, that you're particularly happy is in there?
Dr. Stuart Sumida: My favorite bit in the film is that the family are called the Clades. In biology, we do what's called phylogenetic analysis. We figure out the evolutionary relationships of organisms. A group of related organisms is called a clade. An evolutionary tree is called a cladogram. So the Clades are literally a family of related organisms. What a great easter egg for someone like me and I can tell you, all my friends who do have evolutionary biology are all going to go, "I got it."
Dr. Elizabeth Rega: For me, there's the big reveal moment, and I don't know if your viewers are in a position of seeing the film already. So this is a spoiler alert if anybody happens to be listening and you haven't seen it. I think it's that reveal at the end when you finally get that sense of the scale. You've been in here, and it may be gradually dawning on you that, "Oh, maybe we're in an organism." But when you hop out and see the eye and the placid eye of our turtle-form creature, I think it's that moment that if you can remember the first time you went up in an airplane and ever saw the landscape below you and saw just how… For me, coming from the American Midwest, we don't get to see that exposure. But when you come out to the American Southwest, and you see fossils being revealed by forces that are geological over time, and you can see that, that's an amazing experience because all of science is about observation with perspective. We may use technology to get further above the earth or further into a specimen with a microscope, but then we're looking and observing, and our molecular colleagues are probing and experimenting. But it's all about the scale of where you're looking, and you don't have to always use the big words to describe what you're looking at.
You can see the work of Dr. Elizabeth Rega and Dr. Stuart Sumida in action in Disney’s Strange World, now available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, DVD, and Digital.
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