Mark Reviews Movies: RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 4, 2021

There's a stunning moment of "acting" in Raya and the Last Dragon, a computer-animated film from the Disney workshop. In it, a woman, who had grown up obsessed and enamored with the idea of dragons, sees a very real dragon for the first time in the heat of a fight. The dragon stares down this woman, a warrior princess from one of the five regions of a land torn apart, and then we see her face. It's filled with what can only be described as awe in the traditional sense—overwhelming wonder and fear in equal parts.

Here's the thing: This film, co-directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, is an impressive feat of animation. It's not really until that moment that we realize just how accomplished the filmmakers' work actually is.

The film is filled with wondrous and diverse locales—from deserts, to forests, to a quaint village based around a temple built upon a rock formation shaped like a heart, to an empty fortress brimming with grief, to a grand city isolated on an island. These lands look real, and while the characters populating them are clearly designed with a bit of a cartoon-ish appearance, they come across as real, too. It's all about the performances.

That's something we don't quite expect from an animated film, aside from the skill of the actors providing the voices for these characters. Here, we get both very good vocal work from a surprisingly deep cast and an obvious dedication to making sure that the animated characters on the screen are "acting."

At a certain point, we stop paying attention to the various technical and artistic components that went into creating this world, moving the characters, and generating the waving and flowing hair on the dragon of the title. Falling to the background of our mind, too, is all of the other computer trickery that gives us convincing water, light and shadows, and a most frightening embodiment of fear and discord, in the shape of crawling black clouds with purple electricity exploding within the darkness.

We just allow the characters, this world, and the story to exist on the screen, as if it didn't take likely a dozen of people working hours to make sure our hero bites her lip in just the right way to present the correct emotion of a scene. It happens in that moment, and that's all that matters. We're caught up almost completely in this fantastical tale, because the story, first of all, is quite good—thoughtful and, beneath the artifices of its fantasy and its computer-based medium, wholly human—and the filmmakers are always using their technical/artistic expertise in service of that story.

On its surface, this tale is an adventure—an old-fashioned treasure hunt of sorts—about the search for the broken pieces of a gemstone crafted by dragons. Two prologues—one incorporating the style of paper animation that transforms into shadow puppetry—explain this world and how it twice fell into despair.

Long ago in the fictional land of Kumandra (based on various cultures of Southeast Asia), the region and its people—divided only by rivers—were threatened by the Druun, those clouds of dark energy, which turns living things into stone. The dragons of the land rescued them, infusing a gem with their magic and sacrificing themselves to rock in the process, but "people being people," the land was divided in a fight for the gemstone.

Five hundred years later, the gem was broken as a result of that in-fighting, and the Druun returned. Six years after that, Raya (voice of Kelly Marie Tran), the princess of the realm of Heart, is on a mission to find the only dragon who, according to legend, survived. From there, it's a matter of collecting the gem pieces from the other four realms, defeating the Druun, and saving everyone—including her father (voice of Daniel Dae Kim), who believed that the five realms (all named after parts of a dragon) could put aside tribalism and become Kumandra again—from being or becoming stone.

Raya does find the dragon, named Sisu (voice of Awkwafina), who's both comic relief (quick on a quip, a rhyme, and plenty of jokes) and as sincere in her optimism as Raya's father—not to mention as filled with grief as Raya. One of the smarter moves by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim's screenplay is how it gives us a cast of genuinely funny comedic allies for the search—young boat captain/entrepreneur Boun (voice of Izaac Wang), fierce but aimless warrior Tong (voice of Benedict Wong), a most adorable con artist of a toddler (voiced by Thalia Tran)—but makes a deeper point with them, too. Each one comes from a different region of the divided Kumandra, showing that cooperation and unity are possible, and all of them have suffered loss from the Druun, those incarnations of division.

In fact, aside from the Druun, there isn't a villain in this story. Namaari (voice of Gemma Chan), the warrior princess from the realm of Fang, is first presented that way, having betrayed Raya in the prologue and hunting for her in the contemporary story. There's much more to her, though, which we see after a one-on-one fight with Raya. The action here, by the way, is plentiful—fights and a chase through the alleys of a city on the water and a rush to rescue people from the Druun—and dynamic.

After the fight is when Namaari sees Sisu, and that's when we get that startling moment of "acting." Namaari wants to believe in what Sisu represents, but her mother (voiced by Sandra Oh) is afraid what a Kumandra united against Fang, having started the devastation, would mean for her land and its people.

There's an admirable complexity to this story's characters and politics, meaning it works as a smart and surprisingly affecting fable about trust on a personal level and a broader scale (A climactic moment of unified sacrifice is especially moving). Raya and the Last Dragon only works as all of these things, though, because the filmmakers excel in their craft and ensure that craft is employed for the story above all else.

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