Parents and children, adults and adolescents, all can relate to the feeling of alienation and justified distrust. It gives Namaari the impetus to reunite the pieces of the Dragon Gem and, this being a Disney movie, save her life and the lives of all others who’ve been turned to stone, including the dragons. However, what Raya does is even harder: She gives her life for an idea, and puts faith in someone who’s let her repeatedly down in the worst, most traumatizing ways. In many ways, it mirrors another iconic sacrifice in a Disney movie, with Anna seemingly giving her life to protect Elsa at the end of Frozen, turning to ice in an act of true sisterly love. In this action, she sacrifices herself to the idea of a better, less polarized world. “Let me take the first step,” Raya says while handing off the Dragon Gem shard she’s been carrying around for half a decade.
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How Raya and the Last Dragon Became the First Disney Movie Made at Home By David Crow And yet, as we later see in the movie, it was a group effort in which every dragon played their part that defeated the Druun 500 years ago, including Sisu. “Have you ever done like a group project and there’s that one kid who didn’t pitch in as much but still ended up with the same grade?” Sisu confesses. When we first meet the adorkable dragon, she’s too modestly self-effacing about how she helped save the world. Coming from a different era, one before polarization had turned so toxic in Kumandra, Sisu recalls the day that made her name legendary. Hence how in a few minutes, we can go from Raya and Namaari having a climactic showdown worthy of a grand martial arts movie to Raya then essentially giving her life to a failed dream of reconciliation reconciliation between herself and Namaari, and reconciliation between the five disparate communities of Kumandra who’ve long forgotten that the same river runs through each of their villages, and the same water races through all of their blood. The power of its ending comes from getting everyone-including the audience-to see that despite justifiable grievances, we’re not dealing with cartoon characters. Namaari is an antagonist, to be certain, but there are no villains in Raya and the Last Dragon. Nevertheless, Raya and the Last Dragon takes Namaari and Fang to the precipice of being irredeemable, even as it refuses to cross the thin line into Disney Villain territory. Why would a Disney movie need to appreciate such nuance? In our real world, it seems harder every day for people to see each other, flaws and all, for the shared humanity underneath. A storyteller doesn’t have to empathize with Namaari’s itchy trigger finger, or sympathize with her motivations to act selfishly out of a sense of duty. A lesser version of this same story most certainly would have. It would have been simple for the filmmakers to make Namaari the villain. And even then, it was still too easy to side with Raya’s rage as she approached Namaari in the climax with red in her eyes. Raya probably wasn’t even fully aware it was an accident when Namaari pulled the trigger, killing Sisu. Admittedly, neither Raya nor the dragon had any way to realize how conflicted Namaari was about this, or how Namaari’s mother put her up to this treachery, convincing the daughter that Fang only needed Sisu and the Dragon Gem to survive. For the good of Kumandra.Īnd, yet again, Namaari deceived Raya by acting conciliatory before pulling a crossbow on her rival and Sisu. She listened to Sisu (Awkwafina), the lovable and kind-hearted dragon who convinced Raya to look past that memory and once more attempt to find peace with Namaari. Even so, Raya was willing to let that pain (mostly) go. In their childhood, Namaari had double-crossed Raya once, leading to the disaster that broke the Dragon Gem and unleashed the Druun. Minutes before this sequence, Raya had once again extended the olive branch to her rival and former friend, and once again been betrayed. And when Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) marched up the steps of Fang’s parameters in search of Namaari (Gemma Chan), I doubt there was a single viewer who didn’t share her anger-and maybe her thirst for revenge. For a brief moment during the climax of Raya and the Last Dragon, it felt like we were a million miles away from any kind of peace. You can read our spoiler-free review here. This Raya and the Last Dragon article contains spoilers.