Short Wave - The Science Fueling Disney's 'Strange World'

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

In Disney's new animated feature 'Strange World,' a band of multigenerational explorers journeys to the center of their fantastical homeland. Along the way, they fend off, make friends with, and unearth secrets about the curious creatures who call this place home. There's the filterlopes, six-legged deer-forms with fan-like antennae. Or scouts, squishy blue balls with 12 elastic limbs. But as fantastical as these creatures sound, each one is grounded in the physics and biology of its real-world counterpart.Enter married couple Elizabeth Rega and Stuart Sumida, professors of anatomy and paleontology, respectively. They've worked as science consultants on more than 70 films, from 'Ratatouille' to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' Film crews bring the duo onboard as biology experts, to help animators figure out how their animal creations — and sometimes their imaginary beasts — should look and move. But 'Strange World' may be their biggest undertaking yet; Elizabeth and Stuart entered at the earliest stages of production to help envision the kinds of creatures that would fill this world with science and wonder. Short Wave's Aaron Scott talks to Elizabeth Rega and Stuart Sumida about their experiences as science consultants on film sets, and the science fueling Disney's imagined new world. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Since this Valentine's week, let's start with a love story. Elizabeth Riga and Stuart Samita met over a cadaver. I met Stewart at the University of Chicago. We shook hands over a cadaver in the medical school. Our meat cute is a scientific meat cute. They went on to get married and moved to the L.A. area, where Stewart's now a professor of paleontology and Elizabeth is a professor of anatomy.

And you know that whole cliche that everyone in L.A. is connected to Hollywood? Yeah, that applies to scientists too. The very first project ever worked on was Beauty and the Beast because of a colleague of mine at UCLA named Charles Solomon who knew a lot of people in the entertainment industry. And then Beth came in very, very nearly after that when we were working on Lion King. And since then, between the two of us, I think we've worked on over 70 films.

Everything from Ratatouille to How to Train Your Dragon, to Guardians of the Galaxy. Filmmakers bring them in to ground the movies in science. Most often that means helping animators figure out how real animals look and move. And it's often because artists, you know, get a lot of life-drawing training on humans, but not on like a platypus or a wildebeest or a pangolin. Sometimes their job is to figure out the science behind sheer make-believe. The kind of what-if story.

You know, we know the dinosaurs can't talk. But if they did, how would their facial muscles be arranged? So they says, what do you know about the anatomy of dragons? And the answer is, I've never dissected one, actually. But the answer then becomes most mythical creatures are built out of pieces we already know. A dragon is a body with wings. Okay, then what kind of wings? Are they going to be terosaur-type wings?

Are they going to be bat-like wings? So even though it sounds like we're doing these fantastic, highly unrelixtable. things. In the end, we mostly get down to basic structure and biomechanics. What you really want to do is make the audience feel comfortable with that creature living in the physics of their universe. Okay, there, bud, we're going to take this nice and slow. Here we go, here we go. Position three, no, four. But all of that is small fry compared to their newest endeavor, helping to dream up a whole new animated world. What is this place?

A subterranean labyrinth where everything's alive. And most things, well, they want to eat you. You mean like this thing? No, that's harmless. Disney's newest movie, Strange World, takes place in an imaginary land.

Humans live in a valley ringed by massive mountains no one has ever passed. And then crisis strikes when the glowing green plants that they harvest for energy start to die off. So to find out what's wrong, three generations of this one family go all Jules Verne and journey to the center of the Earth, or whatever the planet is called. The subterranean strange world is entered by the family called the clades.

And the clade, by the way, in biology means a group of related organisms. So it's a wonderful little Easter egg. Did you have any idea all of this was down here? Not at all. We are definitely off the map now. This world is populated by all sorts of strange beasts, ranging from manoray-like things that swim in rivers through the sky to giant rolling blobs that have mouths full of tonnacles.

And all the plants seem to dance and pulse. An alien space that would remind you at first of snorkeling in a coral reef. With the diversity and the branching forms and the colorfulness, lots of pinks, Lots of yellows, lots of blue, lots of fluid. This place is amazing. Here, dear listener, we come to a major spoiler alert. There is no way to talk about this science

without giving away the movie's big reveal. So I'm going to pause if you want to watch it first. Still here? Okay. The strange world that our explorers are traveling through is the innards of a giant turtle. If this place has an eye, it has to be attached to a head. And if this place has a head, that means what we've been traveling through this entire time was its insides. Like its guts and stuff?

Okay, yes, hear me out. The windy force that we were in, that's the lungs. And the acid lake, that's the stomach. You see alveoli waving. You see the immune system at work. You can come back once you see the reveal and then see all of the clues that the artists have given us, because all of those structures that we see are cellular and, tissue level structures that you see in the real world.

Today on the show, Stuart Samita and Elizabeth Riga shrink us down to the size of immune cells. And together we head into the anatomy of a giant turtle to look at the science behind Disney's biologically delirious new film, Strange World. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. So Elizabeth and Stuart, Strange World takes place inside. a giant turtle. Our characters who live up on the shell start out their journey in the lungs.

They travel through the stomach, through the liver, they end up in the heart, and each of these locations looks like it could be its own science fiction planet inspired by biology, which seems like a science consultant's dream come true. Can you tell us a bit about the conversations

you both had with the animators is they were creating these landscapes? Well, you know, you've hit it on the head, is that When you see our reveal, it looks like a giant turtle. But really, we're looking at a hybrid organism that's turtle form, right? It's pretty clear when we go inside that a lot of the analogies have been borrowed from marine ecosystems, but also the complexities of insects and arthropods.

I think probably one of the best examples of where they really ran with ideas that were presented early on is the way they perceive both the entrance and the respiratory system. And when we think of a turtle, we think it's a vertebrate, it's a backboneed animal that breeze that brings air in and out of its mouth into its lungs. So when you looked at what you thought were trees that expanded and contracted, those were really very close analogs to the terminal end of our respiratory tree called the alveoli. However, getting inside the strange world was actually more of an insect idea, which Beth presented to them as caves, because insects don't breathe through their mouth into lungs. They breathe through a series of progressively smaller tubes called trachea.

And so trachea start as little holes on the side of the animal's body, so they could enter into this as if entering a cave. So what you have is a hybrid of the ideas of the respiratory system between insect and vertebrate. As incredible as the landscapes are, it's really the creatures to me that make the movie because it is imagining these microscopic things, blood cells, stem cells, immune cells, as what if they were more birds or bears or dinosaurs, creatures that fly and move and have personalities? Tell us about the creature creation process. I think we would have to focus on Splat, right? As Splat as our adorable sidekick character, perfect for plush toy creation. So Splat as a character is very interesting. He's modeled on a macrophage, but he's not really as spherical as a macrophage would be.

He's kind of a viscous, shiny, bluish-looking, translucent, blanche. Bobby charming kind of guy with these little projecting limbs or pseudopods that give him an expressivity that I've only seen before in the flying carpet in Aladdin and the tassels. Let me see. You can trust me. I think that Splat very much kind of comes across as a macrophage, the way he transports himself by rolling and anyone that's acquainted with the migration of these macrophages through the endothelial lining of the blood vessels, right?

They're in the circulatory system. They charm their way through and activate a whole cascade of molecular interactions that cause invaders inside the interstitial spaces of the tissues to be able to be disabled, identified, labeled. And you see that at various times. You get a little sticky thing shot at you, and then all of a sudden the cells have marked you,

and then you're targeted for being engulfed. These are not only miraculous, cool, strange things that happen, they happen in real life inside our own bodies all the time. These cells are capable of distorting and squeezing in and out of blood vessels. They can literally squeeze between cells. So they took advantage of that, actually, in one of the scenes in the film, where it actually can squeeze underneath what looks like, you know, a door. Open the door.

Yeah. Because they're so highly distortable. So to wrap up our visit to this delightfully strange world, I would love to know what the main takeaway of the film was for the both of you. My favorite character in this is, in fact, Ethan's mother, and in part because you're seeing a multiracial family. And it is not the point of the story. It's not even commented upon.

But as someone who's worked extensively with the studios, particularly Disney, on making those characters rather than caricatures out of those individuals, you can see her face in Ethan's. You can see her husband's face that multiculturalism and multi-population approach without making it the point of the story, I think is powerful. And a lot of my students, as well as my son have commented, not only that, but the film's attitude toward same-sex relationships. It was very matter of fact. It's not the point of the film, but it is the world in which these people live. And it isn't the source of the Clayed family's strife. I mean, I think Ethan kind of comes out to his grandpa, and his grandpa's like, yeah, cool, what's you like? Any sweethearts waiting for you back home, huh?

Ah, there it is. Who is it? It's no one. Diazo. His name is Diazo. Diazo, huh? I really like him a lot. I just don't know how to tell him because I just get this.

I always get so this. Hey, let your grandpa give you some solid advice. To me, that was actually one of the most touching things because it didn't even feel like coming out. Coming out was not an aspect of this film. It was just assumed Ethan had a crush on a boy, and that was completely natural and normalized, and nobody even batted an eye.

And that, to me, as a queer viewer, was really a magical touch. Quite resonant, I think. It's imagining what would that strange world be if our conflicts with our family had nothing to do with who we were attracted to or who we chose to love. And one of the things that is an obvious message in the film, of course, is that we need to take care of the planet we're living on. And so that's far more important than worrying about these other petty issues.

Let's not worry about that. Let's worry about what's really important, saving our planet, respecting our planet, respecting the strange world that we have damaged that we live in. Elizabeth Stewart, it's been just an utter joy to talk with you both. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for your patience. We really appreciate the attention, absolutely. If you want to learn more about the science behind Strange World,

Disney just released a short video about it that interviews Stuart Elizabeth and a bunch of the animators as part of the DVD Blu-ray 4K versions. There's also a very fun faux documentary about all the world's creatures. Today's episode was produced by Margaret Serino, edited by Gabriel Spitzer, and fact-checked by Anil Oza. Josh Newell was our audio engineer.

Rebecca Ramirez is our supervising producer, Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Our senior director of programming is Beth Donovan, and our senior vice president of programming is Anya Grundman. I'm Aaron Skat. Thanks, as always, for listening to Shortwave from NPR.