I had no great hopes for this but it did get decent reviews and it is the first Disney animated feature to be inspired by Southeast Asian culture so it seems almost obligatory to watch it. Unfortunately it pretty much falls in line with my expectations: it’s technologically impressive and the art design is fantastic. But it is an American film through and through with only a very superficial veneer of Southeast Asian aesthetics pasted on. In being very much a kids’ only show of little interest to adults, it also feels like it’s Disney and not Pixar, which is kind of interesting given their ownership structure.

The land of Kumandra is divided into different tribes after the fall of their dragon protectors due to the threat of the evil Druun spirits. As a child of the Heart tribe, Raya accidentally made things worse when she trusted a new friend, Namaari, of the Fang tribe with the dragon gem, the last bit of dragon magic. Namaari tried to steal it and the ensuing fight results in the gem shattering into pieces and the resurgent Druun turning most of the people in the world to stone, including Raya’s father. As an adult, Raya and her animal companion Tuk Tuk, visits each of the rivers of the world to track down the last known surviving dragon, Sisu, to restore her father. She succeeds at awakening Sisu at the last river but the dragon claims that she needs the magic of the dragon gem. As the pieces of the shattered gem has ended up with the five tribes, so she must journey to each one to recover the magic.

This is basically as generic and bland a fantasy story as you can get, made even more awkward by needing to use a prologue to tell the backstory of the world. Even the theme of trust here is childishly shallow and obviously selected in order to be inoffensive as possible. As my wife notes, no parent these days would teach their child to trust strangers and this has zero resonance with the world today or anything to do with Southeast Asia. It feels exactly like what it is: a commercial product through and through, made to order to fill a hole in the screening schedule and bearing a theme that no one who worked on it really believes in. While this film has Southeast Asian esthetics, feature recognizable foods of the region and Raya calls her father ‘ba’ which we are supposed to find endearing, the characters in it all speak and behave like Americans. The dragon Sisu, voiced by Awkwafina, even is Awkwafina down to facial mapping and body movements. The sense of humor, the relationships between the characters and the body language, with the lack of respect for physical boundaries, are all wrong for Asians.

The film does admittedly look amazing and their technology is better than ever. The water for example gets so close to photorealism that it looks strange next to the still cartoonish character designs. The unique designs for each of the fives tribes are even more impressive and of course we can see how they’re derived from Southeast Asian architectural styles. It feels very profligate however to see how much work went into each setting but we actually only see each of the different lands for a very short time. As for the fight choreography, you can tell that they put effort into getting the moves look right, but the fights still lack impact as it never looks like they are seriously trying to hurt one another. As with all such American animated features, the action mainly comes from kinetic chase scenes, of which there are many, rather than fights.

All in all, this is a kids’ show through and through and we probably have little business watching it. Its references to Southeast Asian culture are so shallow as to be not worth mentioning and its nervousness about not offending anyone at all is itself off-putting to thinking adults. It would be far more interesting for example to actually model each land after a different Southeast Asian nation but then that would involve actually judging nations and people so instead it plays it safe by mixing everything together. Southeast Asia is a complex region and the countries that comprise it have many problems and conflicts with one another. But it has never been a unified land of any sort so it’s just as well that this is pure fiction.