Critique: Raya and the Last Dragon

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

This was a really fun film. The woodlouse/armadillo/pangolin Tuktuk was adorable and the sound effects of him rolling along were perfect. It’s just a shame Raya didn’t give him an actual name (‘tuktuk’ is his species name).

 

Kumandra was ravaged by druun who petrify humans and dragons. The dragon Sisu, they believe, created the Gem to save people: the druun were banished and humans were un-petrified.

Five hundred years later, Benja, Chief of Heart and Raya’s father, believes people can unite. Raya shows Namaari, Fang’s princess, the Gem and Namaari breaks Raya’s trust. The Gem breaks and each tribe steals a piece of it. After this, the druun reawaken.

 

Six years after the betrayal, Raya brings back Sisu. As they collect Gem pieces, Sisu gets the powers of her siblings.

When Raya says she still has a chunk of the Gem to make Sisu feel better, Sisu compares it to losing a puppy: “If I said you still have a big chunk of it, would you feel better?” Another line that awakened the cackle was, “Actually I think the lying made you look like a liar.”

So it’s very tempting to say the dragon was comic relief. But every member of Raya’s company took up that humorous role. Often funny sidekicks are unnecessary to the story but by making every sidekick funny, their role in the story was solidified. Increased, even.

Sisu’s hair in human form was spectacular.

 

There are a few problems.

At the end of the film when the Gem is reunited in full, all the dragons come back. The first time, the Gem didn’t bring back the dragons yet this time it did? Why? How? With all the information we have, this doesn’t seem plausible.

Each dragon has their own powers, like transformation or walking on rain. Sisu only gets extra powers because of the Gem. Yet at the end, all the dragons can walk on rain. Again, how and why? Unless every single dragon touched the Gem. They couldn’t have walked on rain until they got to the Gem, but they couldn’t have got to the Gem without walking on rain.

I wasn’t a fan of Noi. The film had a series tone to it. Noi’s silliness seemed completely out of place.  Besides, there was already enough appropriate light-heartedness in the film. I did, however, like how her monkeys had gills.

So Raya says that the dragons brought people rain and water. Um, rain is water. I think the implication was rivers so that should have been said instead (lakes/ponds can be formed by rivers, rain or both so they wouldn’t need to be specified in the list).

 

Trust was the clear message of this film.

This is a message Raya refuses to learn from Sisu because Raya blames her trust in Namaari and Benja’s trust in the other tribes for causing this mess. But Sisu points out that if they’d trusted each other to start with, there would have been no betrayal.

To trust in people when you think you shouldn’t, to give everyone a chance, multiple chances. To trust in who someone could be, not necessarily who they are now. Hence forgiveness is the other message of this film, clear via implications but hidden with subtlety.