Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney’s newest animated adventure comes with a lot of anticipation due to it featuring a Southeast Asian princess and mythology pertaining to those cultures. Raya is the titular character of this story and she is the daughter of the chief of the Heart kingdom. Long before she was the land was protected against evil by dragons. Unfortunately in a climactic battle, all but one dragon was turned to stone and the kingdom split into five distrustful kingdoms, with the Heart kingdom having the stone. Having been promoted to stone protector, she immediately befriends Namaari from Fang. This instantly proves bad as the other kingdoms come to claim it, breaking the stone and unleashing the dark magic on the world. Years later, she all grown up and on the search of the last dragon and the broken pieces, in the hopes of saving the world.
What I found most compelling about Raya and the Last Dragon is the lore behind the creation of the monsters. The concept of humans being the monsters is not new, but Raya does a sweet job of making it the human’s actions and mistrust for one another as the reason the monsters exist and persist. Not just a smart world building play, it means that the characters will truly have to overcome something more than just putting pieces together. There’s also lots of subtext that keeps these characters from being able to know everyone’s motivation.
Unfortunately for me, the climactic sequences didn’t quite jive for me with this deeper look. The mistrust angle was there but the characters were driven into such a corner that they had to make the right decision. This is definitely the function of a good plot, but the execution of the last 15 minutes truly felt compressed. It can take one moment to break trust, but isn’t trust earned over time? This is a question that the movie doesn’t quite know what to do with as it’s aiming to rap things up with a nice bow. I know we don’t necessarily come to animated films for realism but there was something a bit too twee about the ending.
However, this does not take away from the genuinely thrilling video game like adventure we went on before that took us from kingdom to kingdom and allowed the filmmakers to truly explore humanity and how we are shaped by the environments. Raya and the Last Dragon proved that it was more than just an adventure film by being able to bring weighty themes and fun action beats together in a fun way.