Review of Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) by Scerenia — 06 Mar 2021

Raya and the Last Dragon ultimately feels like a story and a world that’s too big to fit into its two-hour run time. Each of the locations and characters felt two-dimensional and left something to be desired as the story simply didn’t have the time to explore them in greater depth.

While watching, I could feel how rushed it felt, especially at the beginning. Major plot points, characters, and relationships started to feel more like checkboxes than story beats. Then, once that pace had been set, it inevitably made other more lighthearted scenes feel like a waste of time given how brushed over everything else was.

Overall the movie is enjoyable and the message is good, but I feel like Raya’s story would have been better told as a series. If it were a show rather than a movie with less than two hours to pack everything in, perhaps the plot and the characters would have had more room to breathe and develop naturally. Maybe Raya could have been the first LGBT+ Disney princess. (The seeds were definitely there.) Instead, the movie and the ending are exciting but ultimately low-stakes as the audience feels little attachment to the world or the people in it.