Walt Disney’s latest animated adventure, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Awkafina, is a visual delight but formulaic to a fault.
Walt Disney’s latest animated adventure, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Awkafina, is a visual delight but formulaic to a fault. Like any number of big movies that will end up being mostly seen via PVOD or steaming instead of in a movie theater, Walt Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon loses something when viewed on an HDTV. It is a gorgeous, detailed, richly colorful adventure film that, like Wonder Woman 1984, Mulan, News of the World and (its existence as a Netflix original aside) The Midnight Sky, was made to be seen on a giant movie theater screen, with big-screen visuals and overwhelming sites not so much papering over story/character issues but serving as at least partially the reason for the season. Absent the overwhelming experience of sitting in the El Capitan’s balcony or the closest possible row of an IMAX theater, Raya and the Last Dragon feels like Disney’s most recent formula becoming as, well, formulaic as once did the Katzenberg-era model. The demographic-specific representation now serves as an alibi for telling the same damn story in a skewed way. Their 59th feature-length animated film plays like a loose remake of Moana, with themes and character arcs gently borrowed from the likes of Frozen and Zootopia, including a „there are no villains“ mentality that frankly plays downright insidious and detrimental in our current hellscape. Kelly Marie Tran stars as Raya, a warrior princess from Kumandra’s „Heart Land“ who finds herself fetch-questing to undo a cataclysmic event that turned the world into a Mad Max-style wasteland. She quickly discovers the last surviving dragon (Awkwafina, doing her best to be the Genie or Maui of this story but coming off closer to Eddie Murphy’s Mushu) who may provide an essential assist in restoring the world to its former glory. From that (surprisingly early) point in the 95-minute (sans credits) story, it’s one quick jaunt to each of the other three divided lands to grab their piece of the MacGuffin. Without going into details, I was impressed at the film’s ability to tell what a post-apocalyptic tragedy without the body count yet disinvested in the emotional stakes by the explicitly temporary nature of the carnage. Moreover, the journey to reunite the broken pieces of the Dragon gem or whatever it’s called is almost too easy, to the point where it’s inexplicable that the folks involved didn’t briefly work together to save the proverbial day, right when the initial disaster occurred.
