Raya and the last dragon - A half decent trailer for most likely a mediocre film that will still get a billion dollars

MysticMisty said:
This hasn't even been a problem for 2D movies since CAPS was created. They made the Magic Carpet from Aladdin look quite nice thanks to CAPS, and were able to do other complex animations with other computer programs too. Hardcore traditionalists bitch and moan about modern techniques, but they allow for things that never would've been possible before.

Which is why it's so sad they couldn't come up with a decent dragon design. I don't think it'd be even good enough for My Little Pony, let alone Disney.
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This is very true. I’d also forgotten about the pattern overlay techniques of animation like Gankutsuou and Chowder that achieve a similar effect, albeit in a more avant grade manner.
 
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The baby was bad enough, but then the boy did Dreamworks Face and I was completely out. It also doesn't help that the moral - trust! unity! work together! - was in the trailer, which just makes the whole thing drearily predictable.

I miss things like The Powerpuff Girls movie, where Mojojojo uses a standard kid-movie moral to cause havoc and further his own ends. This may have the trappings of a different part of the world, but it's going to be exactly the film you think it is, and that's boring.
 
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madethistocomment said:
Southeast Asia is comprised of nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali, the Philippines, you get the picture.
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A minor correction, Bali isn't a nation. It's an island and a part of Indonesia. Can't blame people mistaking it for a nation though, since it's more popular tourism spot than Indonesia as a whole itself.
 
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madethistocomment said:
.....You do realize that the cultures that Raya is inspired by aren't East Asian, right? It's inspired by Southeast Asia which is a completely different region from China, Japan, Korea, etc. and SE Asians (both those who live in America and especially those born and raised in the region) will get pissed if you try to imply otherwise. Southeast Asia is comprised of nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali, the Philippines, you get the picture.

For as stupid and half-assed as Disney's been in the costuming department (and doubtlessly in many other departments, knowing them) there are some pretty dead giveaways to the fact that the movie takes inspiration from Southeast Asia. This is primarily in the architecture of different structures seen in the trailers, the forms of martial arts used by the characters, the landscape of the setting, and the fact that her weird little armadillo steed thing is literally named Tuk Tuk, which is a pretty widely used term down there that means "rickshaw," a very common vehicle in the region.

Just because something is Asian doesn't automatically make it Chinese. That's ironically a mentality that would make China extremely happy, and I wish people would break out of it more.
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Frankly, I was basing my assumption of this being yet another attempt to appeal to the chinese market mainly on how much Disney has been sucking chinese microdick more and more in the past decade.
What I said still stands, though: They don't use legitimate, real clothes from irl nation's histories to avoid pissing off the political beehive that is Asia as a whole. They don't go out too blatantly with "Tribe x is our version of nation y" cause that could piss off people a whole lot... And it doesn't really matter whether these tribes are stand-ins for Korea/Japan/etc. or Indonesia/Vietnam/etc. If anything, it feeds into what I am saying even more:

The South China Sea is a hotly contested region with many nations laying claim to the same stretch of ocean, with china becoming increasingly aggressive with their demands and their hostile activity. All these nations used to be vassal states in the periphery of the former chinese empire to some degree, paying homage (and taxes/tribute) to the chinese emperor. Now china very aggressively wants to reclaim ever growing parts of that region for their nation and become the centre of political and economic power, with all other nations following their demands and orders (like in the good old times).

The basic plot of this movie seems to be:
Dragons protected the unified lands from evil and some blue crystal ball was somehow tied into this.
Something happened, the multiple tribes started to argue and broke the ball, almost all dragons turned to stone and the tribes split up, the crystal got scattered.
The tribes now hate/distrust each other and squabble amongst themselves, while a growing threat from the outside looms.
MC (Raya?) goes out to find the Dragonballs and to summon Shenlong a Dragon to summon the Dragonball.
Presumed end: The multiple tribes find common ground and overwhelm the threat together under the leadership of the MC's tribe.

All this can be tied very easily into pandering to china by making it about all other tribes (ie: nations) become united under one tribe's wings. If they want to be super blatant with it, the Dragonball/Dragons could just be a metaphor for the chinese empire and their vassal states and how everything went to shit, once the chinese empire broke down... and lo and behold, the chinese empire broke down when european nations started throwing their weight around in Asia.

It's also just very telling that the MC's tribe is called the Heart of the Dragon - heart being synonymous with "something in the middle" but also with "essence" and "soul". I doubt I have to go into detail how that ties into chinese self-perception. There's also the thing that the azure dragon used to be a symbol of china itself.

I still fully expect the BBEG in this movie to be a metaphor for foreigners/europeans and I expect there being more or less subtle hints at the blue dragonball being a metaphor for chinese influence or identity.

Maybe I'm just way too cynical and all this is reaching, but with the Disney "Thanks for allowing us to film here, Xinjiang Bureau of Administration and Concentration Camp Management" Company, you never know. They desperately crave Yuan bills and there is not a single chinaman knob unslobered by Disney execs in an attempt to get to them.

I'm actually going to salute Disney if at some point they compare the united tribes in this movie with the words "brotherhood", "siblings" or something along those lines.
It would be a rather subtle way to get an implied hierarchy past Western audiences' perception.
 
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There is a Tvtropes page, and it reveals creator had said Raya is ackchually LGBT and shippers are valid.
Priorities! We will start getting movies soon like that old one where it ended unfinished, with just text on screen noting wtf is supposedly happening, that you are filling in for with your imagination. After all, who needs characters where statements exist...
 
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The Nothingness said:
Well television ads are saying that this movie is being praised by the critics (no surprise). As @Yamma Damma asked, has anyone who has gone to the cinema or has a Disney+ account seen it and what are their thoughts on it?
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Does it cost extra? My brother got me a Disney+ account for Christmas so I could bite the bullet, but if it costs extra like Mulan did I'm not doing it. I refuse to give any money to the Rat.
 
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UnsufficentBoobage said:
There is a Tvtropes page, and it reveals creator had said Raya is ackchually LGBT and shippers are valid.
Priorities! We will start getting movies soon like that old one where it ended unfinished, with just text on screen noting wtf is supposedly happening, that you are filling in for with your imagination. After all, who needs characters where statements exist...
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Movie will just exist for fan fiction.

Why bother putting effort into a film when all that people want is "who's fucking who?" and endless merch reveals.
 
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I think I'll give the floor to Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending, one of the best movie review websites out there:
Plot synopsis:
Raya and the Last Dragon tells the story of a place called Kumandra, which was once a prosperous land until 500 years ago, when an army of malevolent spirits called Druun were defeated by the sacrifice of all the dragons, who focused all of their power into a magical orb wielded by - wait for it - the last dragon, named Sisu. Since then, Kumandra has split into five warring territories, each named for its position along the dragon-shaped river that threads through the continent: Fang, Spine, Talon, Tail, and Heart. It speaks to the almost indescribable sophistication of the script, credited to Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim on top of the usual army of story people, that "Fang" is where the untrustworthy evil shitheads live, and "Heart" is where the noble visionary optimists live. As the film starts, Benja (Daniel Dae Kim), chieftain of Heart, hopes to bring all five tribes into a unified Kumandra once more; unfortunately, Virana (Sandra Oh) of Fang is merely interesting in using this gesture to sneak into Heart and steal the magical orb, which still resides in a vault in Heart. I feel like a god-damned four-year-old typing out these proper nouns. In the ensuing tussel, the orb is shattered into five pieces, the seal holding back the Druun is loosened, and in hardly any time, Kumandra has been turned into a wasteland where most of the human population has been turned into statues.

Six years later, Benja's daughter Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), who was substantially responsible for allowing Virana to get up to her shenanigans, has looked in literally every corner of the land but one for the final resting place of Sisu. And we catch up with her as she arrives at that resting place, where she revives the old dragon, only to find that she's a bit of an addled, not-terribly useful hyper-optimist, voiced by Awkwafina. But the dragon can tell the human this much: the more pieces of the orb the pair can find, the more powerful she'll become, until she can reunite the entire orb to seal the Druun once more. And so they trek from one territory of Kumundra to the next, each of of them conveniently designed as a different ecosystem, all of them functioning very much as a Legend of Zelda dungeon, right down to how Sisu gets a new special ability that helps them beat the boss of each stage.
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Overall opinion:
Raya and the Last Dragon is a fundamentally insincere movie, full of snide quipping and pandering gags (there's a room full of beetles that fart glitter - I'm not even sure what that's pandering to, but I know that I hate it) and a glib sense of modernism that makes it impossible to give a shit about its fantastical neverwhen vision of Southeast Asia, since it's very clearly not a real place with real stakes. It's just window dressing; the film feels like a template has had a few blanks filled in with Asian accoutrements, rather than a story that has been designed to take advantage of the location, or the time period, or the mythology. The film is so goddamn gorgeous that I almost can't stand it, and that's the whole reason I have given it my most unenthusiastic possible passing grade; (three stars out of a possible five) this is the beauty of a hollow egg, a fragile surface surrounding a yawning, empty core of bad storytelling, vague characters, and terrible gags.
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In short: Skip it. Disney is continuing on its downward spiral, it seems *sigh*
 
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Marissa Moira said:
Movie will just exist for fan fiction.

Why bother putting effort into a film when all that people want is "who's fucking who?"
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This is why I avoid any discussions of new stuff, especially on girl-heavy platforms...damn, I, too, get an innate drive to search for relationships in groups you observe, but these people literally only care about this shit. Oh, and also "morale". Augh.
 
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Muttnik said:
This is what Disney has become. Soulless remakes, owning every single studio, pandering to China, and wasting beautiful animation on mediocre stories. What a joke.

Anyway, the movie was basically a knockoff of Legend of Korra. So if you hated that, you'll hate this.
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tbf I hated Legend of Korra but that shit never once came to my mind while watching this lol
 
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millais said:
Isn't "Sisu" the Finnish national characteristic? They should have named the dragon something else.
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It's vaguely Indonesian, which is probably enough for Disney. That said, nothing else about the naming scheme makes sense, so your guess is as good as mine. (lol at the nations named after dragon parts. At least use the local equivalent or something.)
 
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Vyse Inglebard said:
I think I'll give the floor to Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending, one of the best movie review websites out there:
Plot synopsis:

Overall opinion:

In short: Skip it. Disney is continuing on its downward spiral, it seems *sigh*
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Good find! But this part raises some eyebrows:
Kumandra has split into five warring territories, each named for its position along the dragon-shaped river that threads through the continent: Fang, Spine, Talon, Tail, and Heart. It speaks to the almost indescribable sophistication of the script,
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Is this sarcasm? It can't not be sarcasm. A dragon-worshipping land naming their tribes after dragon parts (not even translated to another language to make it sound unique) sounds lazy as shit. Avatar had the same lazy naming for their lands but at least wasn't on the nose about what kind of people lived there. "Fang is where evil shitheads lived and Heart is where visionary optimists live", that broad painbrushing was begging for enemy infiltration.
 
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