Review of Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) by Titaniumdragon — 24 Mar 2021

Raya and the Last Dragon - or Raya and her Trust Issues - is a decent but unexceptional CG animated movie from Disney. The movie features vibrant and striking visuals, but a cast of essentially two characters plus a bunch of character shaped props.

It is a movie whose moral is that it is only by extending trust can we expect trust in return wherein the ENTIRE PLOT is driven by people backstabbing those who were foolish enough to trust them.

No fewer than two characters on two separate occasions are shot and killed by people with crossbows after extending their trust to the wrong people.

And this is, ultimately, a major problem with the movie - it not only actively undermines its own moral but encourages the idea that people who hurt you are good deep down inside and just need the chance to show it - even though a number of the people show that they are tribalistic and don't care about anyone outside their tribe.

Of course, this coming from the studio that brought us Stockholm Syndrome and the Beast, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us.

But let me back up for a moment.

Raya and the Last Dragon is a movie about a young woman named Raya who previously was assigned to protect the Dragon Gem, a magical artifact created by the last of the dragons 500 years ago to hold back horrible fire monsters that were turning everyone in the world to stone. Raya’s father invites the other peoples of the world to the country of Heart to all come together, as they once did long ago, and have there be peace between the peoples of the world.

As you might have guessed, this results in the other nations taking advantage of their hospitality to try and seize the Dragon Gem, resulting in it shattering, which causes the horrible fire monsters to come back and start turning everyone to stone, including Raya’s father. The only thing that can hold the monsters at bay are fragments of the Dragon Gem, of which there are five – and the leaders of each of the four other groups seize a chunk, in addition to the piece that Raya herself holds.

Six years later, Raya is a grown adult and is searching the world for the last dragon. She eventually finds her, discovering that the dragon has been in a sort of stasis for the last 500 years, but finds out that the dragon can’t just make another gem – that gem was created by the combined magics of the last five dragons, so the only way to fix it is to reassemble all the pieces.

Que the MacGuffin hunt.

While this might sound like it is a movie about a girl and her dragon, as it turns out, the other main character of the movie is actually Namaari. Namaari is another young woman who appears in the introduction, trying to befriend Raya, only to reveal her actual purpose in doing so was to steal the Dragon Gem. It is Namaari’s fault that the world is broken, and throughout the movie, Namaari is hunting Raya, trying to figure out what it is that Raya is after and to seize the artifacts from her.

The two young women clash repeatedly throughout the movie in a number of well-choreographed fight scenes that are nice to watch, and the relationship between them works pretty well – while they hate each other, there’s also a certain thread of familiarity between them, and we see at certain moments that Namaari regrets what happened on some level but doesn’t believe things can be fixed. Of course, this thread of hope is repeatedly dashed as Namaari repeatedly does things to keep furthering the fight between the two young women, and Raya herself is unwilling to tell Namaari what is really going on, concealing her quest from her because of their past together.

This is all well and good, but the other characters are extremely flat.

Sisu, the titular Last Dragon, is endlessly full of optimism and trust. The movie seemed like maybe it was going to create some sort of middle ground with her, but there is no character development for Sisu. She starts the movie the same way that she ends it, and there’s no real changes at any point.

The rest of the cast gets even less screen time, and all rehash the same backstory of having lost their family to the monsters. While there are a couple of good moments here and there, they don’t really get developed.

Meanwhile, everyone else in the world has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, in a movie about trust. And indeed, two of these “party members” themselves backstab the party at some point.

All of this might make it sound like I didn’t enjoy this movie, but I actually did enjoy myself while watching it. The main reason why is the visuals.

This movie has really vibrant colors, and does a really good job of making its world pop, and the environments are distinctive. The action in the movie works well as well. The fight scenes look great, as do the dragon’s power ups, little as they are used. Ironically, the dragon herself is probably the weakest bit of visual design in the movie.

Overall, the movie is mediocre. Okay, even. But not great.