Review: Raya and the Last Dragon

Hey look. it's a movie that starts off in a dramatic situation - in this case, a warrior woman racing through a barren wasteland - then says "bet you're wondering how I got here" and goes into a lengthy flashback. At least here there's just about enough backstory to justify the cliche: 500 years ago the land was united (and had dragons!) until an evil collection of dark clouds called the Druun started draining the life from everyone and turning them into stone statues. 

The dragons eventually defeated them but at a cost. They vanished from the kingdom, leaving behind humans and a single solitary dragon stone to fend off the (now also vanished) Druun. 500 years passed, and without dragons the humans split the kingdom into five separate warring states; now one ruler, Benja (Daniel Day Kim) wants to reunite them. Unfortunately human mistrust and greed - and a bit of naivety on the part of his daughter, Princess Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) - sees his plan fall apart, the stone broken apart, and the Druun unleashed yet again to ravage the land.

So when the story really begins, Raya is on a quest to track down the rumored last surviving dragon Sisu (Awkafina), pursued by Namaari (Gemma Chan), a rival warrior princess from another kingdom who doesn't so much want the power Raya is after for herself (though she does) as she doesn't trust Raya with it.

Trust is the big theme of this film, as time and again it's made clear that the biggest problem the five kingdoms face is a lack of trust between each other. And often, within the kingdoms too - after finding Sisu they embark on a quest to reunite all the pieces of the shattered dragon stone, only to find that often the other kingdoms have fallen into ruin because of their own internal mistrusts. Not to mention that Raya's quest is to literally save the world, which you'd think everyone could get behind if only they trusted each other.

Hang on, aren't the real bad guys here the evil life-draining death clouds? Well yeah, and while the message here is a strong one it does occasionally suffer from a bit of a disconnect with what's actually happening in the story. The moral is that if everyone trusts each other the world can be healed; the fact that what literally messed up the world in the first place was trusting too much gets kicked to the curb.

But message-laden plots are standard for Disney these days (presumably parents would get twitchy at the idea of a cartoon that was just fun to watch), and they're smart enough to bury the medicine in a sackful of sugar. The animation is both gorgeous and flawless, the characters are perfectly designed (Sisu in both dragon and human form is spot-on), the story barrels through a string of unique and memorable South Eat-Asia inspired locations like the best fantasy tourism video you could ask for and the action - of which there is plenty - is always thrilling to watch.

If there's anything that prevents this from being a top-tier Disney outing, it's that at times it's a little too busy. There's a lot going on here and it's going on all the time; while the big moments land and the smaller scenes are often poignant there's not always enough space between the two to let the story breathe. 

It's not quite too much of a good thing, but with a lengthy backstory, seven or eight main characters, numerous locations and a story that doesn't slow down, you might come out of Raya and the Last Dragon feeling just a little like you've been fighting the Druun yourself.

- Anthony Morris