Five hundred years later, an attempt at peace talks results in the dragon gem getting shattered into five pieces. In the aftermath, the people divided into five warring, mutually distrustful nations named for different parts of a dragon - Talon, Fang, Spine, Tail and Heart. The last dragon remaining, named Sisu, unleashed a great power from a spherical gem, which banished the purple bad guys, but she disappeared in the process. If you're not paying strict attention during Raya's opening monologue, you'll miss a whole lot, so here's the gist: The land was once whole and good and peopled with (dragoned with?) lots of dragons, but then some purple cloud-monsters came along and turned most everyone to stone. Which makes sense, given that it was a sudden but inevitable betrayal that kicked off the glorified fetch quest that forms the film's plot. And she's something else, something no Disney Princess before her has been: She's complicated. But she's a lot more than that - she's a warrior, for one thing (the film's numerous fight scenes are thrillingly choreographed).
Raya, voiced marvelously and with deftly nuanced emotion by Kelly Marie Tran, is a Disney princess, technically: She's the daughter of Chief Benja (voiced by Daniel Dae Kim) in a land called Heart. And that - in addition to their esophagus-with-hipbones body frames, and eyes so large they could have been creatures who've evolved to life in benthic caverns - is what makes them seem so flat, one-note and passive. Here's the answer: They didn't have personalities. That's a opening song, a statement of principles, not a personality. Their "I want more than this" yearning and determination, you say? Wrong. Pop quiz, hotshot: What was Cinderella's defining character trait? Belle's? Ariel's? Rapunzel's?
Here's something that Raya and the Last Dragon gets clearly and unambiguously right, however: the Disney Princess as flawed hero.
Disney needs to get better at this, and those knowing, coming-from-inside-the-house critiques offer them a solid, actionable path forward. So it's dispiriting, if not exactly surprising, to see some less-than-enthusiastic reactions from critics of Southeast Asian descent, ranging from the film's broad, salad-bar approach to the five nations it depicts (a bit of Muay Thai here, a Vietnamese floating market there, some Indonesian architecture there, etc.) to the fact that much of its main voice cast is composed of East Asian actors. The crucial difference, of course, being that European and Scandanavian cultural mashups are thick on the ground, while depictions of Southeast Asian culture(s) in American media remain few and far between. basically, all of Europe ( Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Tangled). This is a company with a long history of throwing different cultures into its narrative Cuisinart, whether Maori and Polynesian ( Moana) or Swedish, Norse, Danish and Icelandic ( Frozen) or. Sharply observed and knowingly deployed cultural details are what transform the broad and abstract concept of onscreen representation into vivid, living stories with the power to reach into us and make us feel that our experiences are not simply valid and worthy, but that they have the potential to inspire others who may not share those experiences.īut Disney, at the end of the day, is gonna Disney. And specificity, of course, is what seals the deal. What's more, the specific setting of Raya - a land divided into five nations - potentially allows for a degree of specificity, with respect to discrete Southeast Asian cultural touchstones. Nationally and globally, that means more enthusiastic butts in (real or virtual) seats. Kids yearn to see themselves onscreen more representation of different cultures means more kids can more directly avail themselves of the Disnefied thrills that white kids have taken for granted for decades. That's a noble goal, and an unalloyed Good Thing - but of course it also happens to be good for Disney's bottom line.
The last dragon movie songs series#
Much will, and deservedly should, be made of the setting of the gorgeously wrought Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon: A fantasy world drawn from a variety of Southeast Asian cultures.įor a company that's been setting so many stories in the same Generically European Fairy Tale Kingdom since 1937 (most recently in 2010's Tangled) it's another in a series of long-overdue steps toward making the world depicted onscreen look more like the world off of it. Raya (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran) faces off with her lifelong foe (voiced by Gemma Chan) in the rich, gorgeously wrought Disney film.
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