RE: Raya and the Last Dragon
A Movie that I Just Finished
From: Travis
March 29, 2021
For many of us, a sad anniversary has come and gone and we're now more than a year in various stages of COVID lockdown. I mean, if we're lucky, shutting ourselves away from family, friends, bars, and movie theaters has been the worst of our misfortunes. Hopefully we've been spared having to say 'goodbye' to those closest to us; hopefully it's just been 'see you soon'. (I feel I should say up front, before I get too bogged down with pandemic despair, that with vaccine roll outs seemingly just over the horizon, there does seem to be real cause for hope -- please try to help me remember that.)
Granting that this is really the least of the complaints someone could have when faced with the worst global pandemic in a hundred years; perhaps one of the biggest shifts we all made was to move our entertainment venue away from the movie theaters and into our living rooms. Over the year, tent-pole releases that would've had us venturing out to the local cinemas got rescheduled, then rescheduled again, then (most) ultimately got punted onto streaming services.
Granting, again, how sad a reflection this is on me, personally; streaming services largely represented my so-called coping mechanisms during the last year at home (plus whiskey). While it wasn't the only one, Disney+ in particular did a lot of heavy lifting in my household. After watching the latest Disney offering to get booted out of the movie house, Raya and the Last Dragon, I reflected back on the year, and how much more impactful some of Mickey's movies were (or could've been) due to Covid-19. (And if you really only care about my thoughts that movie, skip down about 1,000 words, to where I say "Finally, it became March")
In the early days, when lock down was a novelty -- hey guys, we get a couple weeks at home! And no one can tell if we've been drinking during the day! -- virtual happy hours abounded and our family, at least, reveled in the extra time. We took a lot of masked-up walks, got our weekly Outback order (got to keep these small businesses afloat, you know?) and dug into Disney+'s initial catalogues. We spent time with your DuckTales'es (2017), your Boy Meets Worlds, and a lot of Be Our Chef (new season when?).
We watched a docu-series about the making of Frozen II, and I was impressed with just how many people actually have to come together to make a movie like that happen, how many actual people are actually behind those thousand names that scroll by. It was also a bit shocking how much of the Disney magic TM is actually just team meetings and conference calls and corporate morass, how close they come to the release date still trying to figure out which songs and scenes are even going to be in the final cut. In an odd way, it felt a bit comforting - a substitute for the in-person meetings I wasn't having just at that moment.
All of this programing still squarely fell within what I suppose Disney expected the service to be (aside from a few scattered musings about when the champions of Be Our Chef were going to be able to take that cruise).
Then a couple of weeks became a month.
Then two.
Easter bunnies had to be given special dispensation to travel house to house, even if families couldn't get together for traditional meals. Movie release dates started shifting; push that release back to Christmas, surely things will be normal by then.
Then summer came.
All of the DuckTales had been seen (2017 and 1987), Boy had Met World and so had his daughter, and companies had already kicked the 'back to normal' can down to the road into 2021.
I guess the remake of Mulan was the first Disney movie that was really impacted by it, doing the Premier Access thing where you could pay an extra $30 to watch it at home instead of in the theaters... but we skipped that one in my house; opting for Trolls World Tour and Scoob! instead (IDK, my kids were more interested in those; make whatever judgements you'd like about my parenting here). We made pop corn buckets, we got boxes of M&Ms, we all sat in a row on the couch upstairs ... but just like chatting with grandma and grandpa via Facetime, it just wasn't quite the same.
The at-home experience surely wasn't the usual fun family trip out to the theaters, but as far as I know, none of those movies had their creative process changed by the pandemic. They had already been filmed, edited, trailer-ed, and made into billboards before everyone went into lockdown; the only impact was to the way they were distributed.
Then, after a span of time that felt both an eternity and the turning of a page, Christmas rolled around.
Maybe it was my own mental state at the time, maybe because of social separation, maybe because of the overall message, or maybe because it was the first time Disney seemed to just say, "eff it, just dump it onto the streaming service, whatever", but Soul came out and that's when it first seemed to me that the streaming service, if not the entire movie making process was being impacted by the pandemic as well.
Soul, by the way, was just a beautiful movie - both the impressionistic, ethereal, cubist Before/After Life and the atmospheric, sun-drenched streets of New York City (center of the universe). The dark basement jazz clubs, the subway trains, the random people on the streets - it almost felt insulting to have a movie so full of urgings to go out and live your life when we were all completely unable to do so, especially thinking of how deeply and rapidly NYC had been impacted when the virus first took hold.
I finished the movie with already watery eyes. We clicked over to the extras and watched a special feature about the making of and I was surprised to find that they had been squarely in the middle of the making process when they, just like all of us, one random day had to pack up their shit and move into the home office. All those same groups we had seen in the Frozen documentary now had their laptops on top of washing machines, kids wandering through the background of their zoom call design sessions, pets laying lazily on keyboards as people VPN'ed into the servers back in the office to set scenes to render. If seeing the behind the scenes corporate workings had been eye opening, this was... i don't know... it came with a pang of compassion? I wondered if any of those people working to finish Soul felt the same conflict I did watching their ode to simply living life as they logged in for their own virtual happy hours.
While I was mulling this over, we blinked and it was 2021 and now our Disney+ subscription was exclusively for WandaVision (and Gravity Falls. Season 3, when?) and I felt like we were watching it in a completely different mindset than they originally planned. I'm not aware of much schedule swapping or production shut downs or anything (certainly nothing like poor Black Widow has endured), but I got the impression that what was always going to be an inventive exploration of the ways people deal with grief now also had the added layer of the whole audience having a full year of lived experience, of their own grief to bring to the table with them. This was no longer a hypothetical (ok, aside from the Chaos magic, the sentient flying robot man, the medium of television signals being used to literally broadcast our thoughts), it was now something we were all doing. At this point, we all had some sort of deep pain in our hearts - whether we were separated temporarily or permanently. We were all falling into TV as an escape from harsh realities. We were all questioning our sanity, our ability to hold our insular worlds together.
I'm willing to bet none of us had cool laser battles and witch fights though... admittedly, that's were the parallels kinda fall apart.
Finally, it became March, our Covid Anniversary due closer, we forked over the $30 or whatever to watch Raya and the Last Dragon at home, and I finally got around to the point of this whole essay.
So, first things first: I really liked the movie.
It was pretty clear that this was the same team that had given us Moana a few years back. The visuals are frankly stunning, gorgeous, somehow better than real life, maybe even at times a bit jarring compared to the characters that inhabit them, but that's an uncanny valley strategy meeting for another day. I noticed the lack of traditional Disney song soundtrack at first, but, if I'm honest, if they didn't get Lin-Manuel Miranda back, I probably would've been complaining about that here.
The plot feels a bit overcrowded for a feature length movie. I think it would've been better served as a limited series, like, I don't know, Avatar: the Last Airbender which it seemed to be cribbing from pretty hard... well, or maybe more from The Legend of Korra (I haven't seen that one yet, but Young Raya and Korra do have more than a passing resemblance).
As it is, we have to learn about:
* All the different dragon body part moniker nations in Raya's world
* Set up a rift between them
* Explain a faceless plague that turns un-harmonious people to stone
* Journey down river branches and the river of time's passage to find and revive the titular Last Dragon
* Journey back through each nation (picking up friends along the way) to find pieces of a broken crystal
* Confront the big bad
* Deal with betrayals and learn how to trust in the greater good
all that in one 2 hour movie? It's an exhausting amount of ground to cover and the thing that suffers most is the character development. People are introduced, maybe have a minute of conflict and then they have to be cool, because we've got to get the eff to the next town, son. There is no time for a proper Prince Zuko arc here.
This, accordingly to the extra features, was another movie they had to make while working form home - with some of the voice actors recording their lines in their closets and emailing the files in. And, maybe I'm imagining it, but I felt like you could kind of hear that? For what it's worth, the cast is still able to deliver a great performance; I especially liked Aquafina.
The thing that, once again hit me (IDK, maybe lock down has impacted me more than I realized if all these Disney shows keep taking me back to this point), was that not only could this movie be a bigger allegory for our COVID experiences, but godDAMN would it have hit so much harder if it had come out at a point when we all felt like the pandemic was really over.
Ok, so I'll try to keep this break down vague to avoid spoilers, but... I mean, think about it.
The main evil force in the movie is these dark blobs that show up out of no where, passing from person to person, turning them to stone and effectively removing them from our day to day life. The blobs get more powerful as mistrust grows between people, but you can avoid them (mostly) by separating yourself from the population at large (they don't like going over water for some reason). The first thing the nations do is start blaming one another for the blobs showing up in the first place; they seem to feel no remorse walling themselves away from one another, and when the solution to beat them does show up, people either leap at the chance to keep it for themselves or are unwilling to take action, because that would be admitting that they did anything wrong to begin with. While you can keep the blobs at bay temporarily with water and special crystals, the way they are ultimately defeated is by all the people of the different nations putting aside their differences, putting their trust in one another, and sacrificing to simply get through.
In the movie, they are able to make those sacrifices, they are able to trust, and they are rewarded; they are able to run into their returned loved ones' arms, they are able to come together to feast and celebrate again (and dragons dance through the skies for good measure). I imagined what it would've been like it I had been able to see this in a regular movie theater with my kids, my parents, with random strangers like the before times. How emotional I'd've felt as the credits rolled and I realized, just maybe, we'd made it through. Instead, when the movie was over, all I could see was myself reflected in the blank screen.
Ok, so, maybe there's still a way that we can feel that impactful message -- if you haven't paid for the early access yet, maybe by the time it hits general availability in Disney+, enough of us will be vaccinated (or moving down that path) that we've earned that sun-come-through feeling. That should be early June -- maybe by the time July 4th fireworks are going off we can be celebrating a different kind of Independence day.