

But when an evil force threatened the land, the dragons sacrificed themselves to save humanity.

Throw in a fluid foot-chase through Talon and a booby-trapped gauntlet-run in Tail (complete with explosive-farting beetles), and Raya is a rare family film with genuine action-blockbuster chops. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 'Raya and the Last Dragon' travels to the fantasy world of Kumandra, where humans and dragons lived together in harmony long ago. But as powerful forces descend on Houma, intent on exploiting the swamp’s mysterious properties for their own purposes, Abby will discover that the swamp holds mystical secrets, both horrifying and wondrous and the potential Raya and the Last Dragon 2021 of her life may not be after all. Veteran Disney director Don Hall ( Big Hero 6) and Blindspotting’s Carlos López Estrada deliver impressively impactful fight sequences that hit harder than typical Disney fare - using crash-zooms and speed-ramping to accentuate the fighting techniques of Raya and her nemesis Namaari ( Gemma Chan) while invoking the cinematic language of Asian action cinema. The complex mythology does make Kumandra feel properly epic, and every stop on Raya’s journey - the desert wasteland of Tail, the lantern-lit market-town of Talon, the dense, foggy forest of Spine - has a distinct, gorgeously realised identity. But the screenplay - from Crazy Rich Asians co-screenwriter Adele Lim and Vietnamese-American writer Qui Nguyen - is pacy and propulsive, punctuating the necessary narrative groundwork with bursts of action and excitement. Long ago, in the fantasy world of Kumandra, humans and dragons lived together in harmony. It’s a lot of lore, and the opening act of Raya has plenty to unfurl – there’s a prologue to a prelude, exposition to dispense about dragon magic and the five factions of Kumandra (Tail, Talon, Spine, Fang, and Raya’s homeland of Heart), and a MacGuffin-driven mission to establish, along with the introduction of Awkwafina’s anxious water dragon Sisu. It stars Justin Timberlake as a former college football star, now an. A rare family film with genuine action-blockbuster chops. The Raya and the Last Dragon is a 2020 American drama film directed by Fisher Stevens and written by Cheryl Guerriero.
