And Another Dragon

In a fantasy world modelled on southeast Asia, a beautiful young woman grapples with her trust issues in 2021's Raya and the Last Dragon. I was surprised that I liked this movie at all but I really enjoyed it, especially the first third. Much like Avatar: The Last Airbender and numerous other American, faux-Asian fantasies of the past 20 years, it has very little to do with actual Asian culture. But I realised this is actually why I like it--it belongs to a tradition much older than Avatar. Raya's ancestors can be found in the various Sinbad movies that thrilled audiences in the first eighty decades of cinema history (I'm particularly fond of Howard Hughes' Son of Sinbad), or various Asian and Arabian fantasies like the great 1940 Thief of Bagdad, and, in a distant way, to Arabian Nights. It's the Western fantasy of Asia and, naturally, it's beautiful and exciting. There are even traces of Shanghai Express and Gunga Din.

Poking around online this morning, I find most of the discourse around this movie is related to its representation of southeast Asians and its similarity to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar: The Last Airbender fans, I've had multiple occasions to observe, have massive chips on their shoulders. I remember talking to one at Comic Con years ago, when James Cameron's Avatar was coming out, and this particular fan felt Cameron's choice of title was a deliberate slap in the face to Last Airbender Fans (I personally think it unlikely Cameron had heard of The Last Airbender but Last Airbender fans naturally don't like to consider this scenario). It hardly surprised me a lot of them got their hackles up when Raya was compared to The Last Airbender, though now they were largely mad because they didn't consider the comparison appropriate. Then it became an excuse for dog-piling Lindsay Ellis for the crime of being successful.

Maybe it's because Last Airbender fans are so bent out of shape about their beloved series not getting the recognition it deserves that they've grown to see any suggestion that one work is like another as an accusation of cold-blooded theft. I finally saw Avatar: The Last Airbender last year--I'd never sought it out because I figured, why watch faux-anime when I can watch real anime? A millennial friend of mine is a big fan so she showed me two or three episodes on Netflix. And I had to admit, it was pretty damned good. I said, "It's like Indiana Jones!" She immediately grimaced and stiffened. I meant it as a compliment but she took it as the gravest insult. The three episodes we'd watched was a second season arc about the heroes exploring an excavated, ancient library to find a mystical artefact that would lead them to another point on their quest. I felt like most people of my generation would call Indiana Jones on it. But, of course, the Indiana Jones movies are themselves influenced by Secret of the Incas, Alad Ladd's China, and the King Solomon's Mines with Stewart Granger, among many other adventure serials. Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, and other filmmakers of their circle, were all heavily influenced by the 1941 Thief of Bagdad. So I was happy to see this tradition alive and well in The Last Airbender and in Raya and the Last Dragon.

But it's the Indiana Jones influence that seems particularly potent in Raya. Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) is armed with a whip sword (a weapon that looks identical to Ivy's distinctive weapon from Soul Calibur). She even uses it to swing across a chasm Indiana Jones-style to where she must carefully remove a gemstone from the booby trapped corpse of its greedy possessor.

Later, when Raya and her friends make their escape on a speeding shrimp boat from a group pursuing on horseback, it was hard not to think of Indy getting away on a plane at the last possible moment at the beginnings of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom.

Where Raya loses its way is in becoming too caught up in a message about the necessity for trusting people. A lot of people have already written about how poorly conceived and executed it is--Raya trusts a girl from a rival country (Gemma Chan) and accidentally enables her to steal the McGuffin, which leads to the near-destruction of the world. Raya is betrayed again and again but she's portrayed as morally deficient when she decides not to trust someone right away, notably the girl who'd already betrayed her twice. The sloppiness extends to some nonsensical dialogue that plenty of people have already picked through. It all adds up to the usual insubstantiality of the message. If only Raya had truly followed the example of The Last Airbender or Son of Sinbad and just concentrated on telling a good adventure with charismatic characters.

Kelly Marie Tran is actually really sexy as Raya. Her voice has a really nice, sensual purr to it once you stop thinking about Rose Taco. And I've warmed to Awkwafina, who plays the titular Dragon, Sisu, ever since I found out she wrote a song about her vagina. I think it was mainly her hideous costume in Shang-Chi that put me off.

The animation is great--sometimes too great as the film occasionally enters the uncanny value, especially with Raya's father. It makes me wonder if the animators didn't simply motion capture the voice actors. I bet it would save a lot of time. But the design and rendering quality is really gorgeous.

Raya and the Last Dragon is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
Zootopia
Moana
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Frozen II