Hey everyone! How's everybody doing today? I'm doing well. It's been a quiet day so far. So last night instead of watching The Orville this week, my sister and I watched Raya and the Last Dragon, the latest movie from Walt Disney Animation Studios. Which means I'm now writing this so I can talk about it a bit. I'm not including any spoilers into this review, because I hope you'll watch it for yourselves if you haven't already done so. So let's get into it.
As you probably know from the post I did about the shows, movies and books that I was looking forward to in 2021, I've been extremely excited for this movie to come out. Especially once I saw the trailer during the night of the Disney Investors' Day announcements. There was just something about the movie's concept that drew me in in a way many Disney animated movies since Zootopia didn't until I actually see them. But this drew me in. I was not prepared for this movie when my sister and I watched it last night. The trailer made it look good, but how good it was I was not prepared for.
Since it appeared on Disney+ outside of Premier Access, I've seen many people compare it to the Nickelodeon animated shows Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. While there are some elements in this movie that are similar to those shows, especially with Raya resembling a younger version of Korra from The Legend of Korra and her companion, Tuk Tuk playing the same role as Appa from The Last Airbender, my sister also saw some resemblance to some Anime that she'd seen as well. I agreed with her to a degree because of the film's Eastern influences on it's story, characters and even animation style.
One of the things that I like about this movie is that it reminds me of the adventure type Disney animated movies The Rescuers, The Rescuers Down Under, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Big Hero 6 (another movie that has a more Eastern influence on it). There's nothing wrong with the animated musicals like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Tangled, and Frozen (among many others) or DreamWorks type comedies like The Emperor's New Groove, Lilo & Stitch, and Wreck-It Ralph, but the 2010s were so full of them that it was refreshing to have a pure adventure movie with real stakes and actual consequences.
Raya herself is a brilliant character. While she's officially a Disney princess, she feels more like an ordinary person who makes mistakes, and then eventually learns from those mistakes. Afterall, she's the reason everything happened the way they did at the beginning of the movie and so the rest of the movie is her trying to atone for her mistakes and seek misguided revenge on Namaari. Which is what makes her so relatable. Interestingly enough, Kelly Marie Tran wasn't Disney's original choice to voice Raya. Originally, she was going to be voiced by Cassie Steele, who played Manny Santos on Degrassi: The Next Generation from 2001-2010. But there was a shift in the character on the creative side so she was replaced by Kelly Marie Tran.
The only other cast members I'm even vaguely familiar with are Daniel Dae Kim (Chief Benja, Raya's father), Benedict Wong (Tong), Sandra Oh (Virana, Namaari's mom), and Alan Tudyk (Tuk Tuk). I'm not current on pop music so I'm not familiar with Awkwafina (Sisu the Dragon), and the rest of the cast is unknown to me due to not having seen anything else they're in, or in the case of Gemma Chan (Namaari), not knowing her by sight from Captain Marvel. The entire cast is phenomenal though.
I found the opening to be a bit slow, but that's okay because this isn't really a fast paced movie and you needed that opening narration to understand the state of the world at the beginning of the movie. Much like how you need the opening narration in the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender to understand what the show is about.
The animation in this movie is absolutely gorgeous. While we were watching it last night, my sister and I commented on how far Disney has come in it's 3-D animation style since the 2000s when they released their first 3-D animated features, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt. Even since Toy Story came out in 1995, CG animation has become more refined. I was drawn in by the visuals as much as I was drawn in by the story and the characters.
Overall Raya and the Last Dragon is an amazing movie. It's interesting, it's chilling in places, and the characters are fantastic. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly HIGHLY recommend you do so ASAP. Especially if you're into Anime. But even if you're not, it's a movie that surprised me from start to finish. I expected to like it, but I wasn't expecting to be as blown away by it as I was blown away by Soul. Though Soul blew away in a very different manner than Raya and the Last Dragon did.
And that my friends is it for me for this week. But I'll be back next week with my thoughts on the first episode of Loki which drops on Wednesday. My sister and I are going to watch the episode on Wednesday night so that review will be up sometime on Thursday. I'm also going to have a movie review going up as well, though I'm not entirely sure what movie I'll be reviewing yet. So until then have a great rest of your weekend and I will talk to you all soon. Take care.
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