This one’s worth checking out.

👍 Cute and beautiful; I didn’t need much else this week

The latest big “OMG FINALLY” moment for Walt Disney Studios was supposed to be in the fact that, with the release of Raya and the Last Dragon, Southeast Asians can at long last “see themselves” in the Disney Animated Canon. A lengthy Twitter thread explained that, on the contrary, many Southeast Asians either don’t yet have the Disney+ access to actually do that or just can’t afford to cough up the extra 30 to stream Raya. I’m told that in Indonesia, the movie’s even playing in theaters; notably, this country already has pretty dismal COVID numbers.

It’s also a bit funny that Disney’s latest attempts at portraying Asian cultures (including the one that was reportedly filmed near a Xinjiang concentration camp for that extra dash of Chinese authenticity) seem to have borrowed some stylistic influences from YouTube cooking videos; both this film and Mulan have disposable food-prep sequences that bring to mind the sort of videos that led to my dad suddenly making wok and (admittedly delicious) sushi every weekend — browsing orientalist YouTube trends may very well be the extent of Disney’s research at this point.

Scenes like that might also be for the weebs in the audience, or viewers who fancy themselves cultured for simply appropriating certain East Asian aesthetics, rituals, or whatever else they’ve learned from snappy online tutorials, and will now praise Disney as inclusive to “Asian viewers”. It is worth noting that Kumandra is not a real place, but a fictitious hodge-podge of Eastern countries. Quite often, this sort of thing is alarming.

That being said, Raya indeed brings attention to specifically Southeast Asian mythologies, and I don’t know that there is homophobia and racism in any of those countries that supposedly-woke Disney feel the need to capitulate toward (by keeping their gay romances subtle enough to be easily edited out, shrinking black characters on their MCU posters, and whatever else makes their products more marketable over there). In short, this is hardly among Disney’s most offensive or faux-woke productions.

And sure, Raya is good for Asian-actor representation, even if it may seem reductive to cast a Chinese-American like Awkwafina, a Korean-American like Daniel Dae-Kim, and so forth when the focus is purportedly Southeast Asian culture. Leading the cast is Kelly Marie Tran, which is also seen as a triumph after all the bullying she received from Star Wars nerds who felt she was the new Jar-Jar. And lo, now she’s one of the big Disney leads.

As a movie, Raya is mainly cute, but it also has some of the darkest interludes of Disney’s latest Animated Canon entries (I almost believed that our heroes would die at the end, which might’ve been more consistent with how the McGuffins are said to work but whatever). And no matter how good CGI is getting, I will always gasp when things like water and fur look as astonishingly detailed as they do here. The story involves god-like dragons (in many Eastern mythologies, dragons are indeed closer to gods than the wyverns we have over in the West) who bring water and evil entities that turn things into stone and ash. There’s a shot where water interacts with a stone texture that made me go “Woof”.

The plot is a fairly basic fetch quest with some fairly basic critiques on humanity’s proclivity for squabble and tribalism. Tran and Awkwafina are entertaining as Raya and the last dragon, respectively, and the scenes where said dragon attempts to seem human are decently funny. Gemma Chan plays a remarkably three-dimensional antagonist and there are many other enjoyable side characters, including Benedict Wong as a massive softie and Alan Tudyk as some sort of giant pillbug. There’s also a turbo baby.

Overall, the film is warm and enjoyable. I preferred the character designs of Soul, which also had cooler lighting effects, but this was still a fun, beautiful watch, made even better by a blurb in the end credits that explains how this movie, due to COVID restrictions, was created in 400 different households by persons with extraordinary patience with the directors’ “inability to use the Internet (Dude you’re still on mute)”.

3/5 whatever