Raya and the Last Dragon (****)
In which American political tensions are personified by giant smoke monsters
Visually marvelous and incredibly relevant, Disney’s newest Princess packs a punch.
Raya is the first Disney animated film to be released since I completed my quest to watch more-or-less the entire Disney animated catalogue. And apart from being one of the first genuinely new films I’d watched during the pandemic, Raya was also the first film that got me to pay for “Premier Access”. Yeah, it’s kind of expensive for a small family, but gimme a break. There was nothing else to do. On the whole, it does seem a little exorbitant to pay that kind of money for a film I ended up getting automatically a few months later – but hey. Here we are.
Raya is not your ordinary Disney princess – which is probably the very thing they’d want us to say for each of the Disney princesses that preceded her. To be fair, she’s got a lot in common with the protagonists of previous films. Firstly – she’s the daughter of the king/chief/whatever. Secondly, she’s got a cute animal sidekick that is mainly there to tick off a box on Disney’s checklist. But on the other hand, Raya differentiates herself from the other princesses in a big way – she doesn’t sing once. There are no songs in this flick, which is a major departure not just from the princesses of Walt’s own lifetime but from the princesses of today. Thankfully, it’s not an omission that you miss. I love the fact that most Disney films are musical, and I’ve written elsewhere that I think musicals as a genre are ideally suited for rich storytelling, but this film works just fine without that. And anyway, Raya’s too busy kicking butt to burst into song. Seriously, there are a number of action sequences in this that are impressive both in the visuals and in the dramatic stakes. The final battle between Raya and her arch-nemesis is particularly epic. If I gotta sacrifice a song or two to get something like that, I’ll take it.
I wasn’t overly taken with Sisu – the titular dragon. Akin to Olaf or Mushu, she was both a comedic presence in the film and a pivotal character to the plot. Maybe it’s that I’m more used to the Western idea of dragons as seen in “How To Train Your Dragon” than the serpentine design of Eastern culture, or maybe it’s that Awkwafina just didn’t make me laugh. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the execution here as far as I can tell – I think it’s just a matter of personal taste. In any case, Sisu and Raya are a contrasting pair of characters whose journey takes us on a self-reflective trip of our own. There’s a lot about this story that reminds me of the political climate that the film was produced under. This film was released just two months after the U.S. Capitol Building riot, where Americans attempted to protest and violently undo the election of Joe Biden to the position of President. The past four years have been politically polarizing, with both sides really hating each other. Even up here in Canada, everyone had an opinion on the American government. It was an incredibly tense time, which is what makes Raya so relevant.
Raya is about a fractured nation. The region of Kumandra has split into several lesser states, each named after a different part of a dragon. These states don’t get along, but more than that, they don’t trust each other. After a crucial incident early on in the film, even our protagonist Raya has no confidence in the inherent goodness of her enemies. To her, the world is a cold, dark, and unforgiving place. “You can’t trust anyone” is repeated multiple times throughout the film.
The big theme of this film, then, has to do with trust. But it’s not the trust formed by a romantic relationship or the trust that a family has for its members. That’s relatively easy to build. Raya’s film focuses on the tricky subject of re-establishing trust, which is so much easier said than done. When someone has double-crossed us, our tendency is to villainize them and keep them at arms’ length. Whether it’s an ex, an estranged family member, a co-worker, or someone who has a different political opinion than you, we do this thing where we write them off – dare I say we ‘cancel’ them. And that might feel like the right thing to do at first; like it’s the only way to bring about justice. But a lack of trust can lead to something ugly – and its exactly what happened to the people of Kumandra.
There are these monsters in Kumandra called ‘Druun’ – a kind of shapeless menace like Lost’s smoke monster or that green ghost stuff from the third Disney Narnia film. The film explicitly states that they’re born out of human discord, which means they’re a very literal representation of the political climate this film was made in. And because of the Druun, the kingdom falls apart. They enter the world precisely at the moment when the various tribes are most at odds, and people get hurt as a consequence.
Raya spends much of the film trying to put the pieces of a magic rock back together in order to defeat the Druun, but finally realizes something – it’s not about the rock. It’s about trust. The moment that she’s able to put aside her bitterness and fear and trust her enemy, the Druun’s failure is assured. What’s great about this is that Disney didn’t pretend that giving trust to someone you don’t like is an easy thing. Raya struggles with it for the whole film, and we see multiple times characters who place their trust in others before being betrayed. The writers know that trust is a dangerous thing to give. But they emphasize a crucial message that I think we all need to hear these days: it’s far more dangerous to withhold trust than it is to give it. Does this mean you should let people walk all over you or let bad things happen to you over and over just because? No, of course not. What it means is that a life without trust isn’t much of a life at all – as painful and as risky of a truth as that is. Trusting people means you will get let down. But not trusting people means you can never get picked back up.
Moral aside, this film was a lot of fun to watch. It’s action-packed, at the top of its game animation-wise, and another quality story to add to the ever-growing list of Disney greats.