Woman of the Month: Raya

Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon

I wish Raya and the Last Dragon had had more of a chance to thrive at the box office, but there was no avoiding the shadow of Covid-19. Hopefully it’ll gain some traction once it comes off the premiere access fee that Disney+ set up for it.

The movie itself has its problems, but our heroine is not one of them. Living in what is perhaps the darkest setup that a Disney Princess has ever endured (Rapunzel’s was pretty bad too, but the film never delved too deeply into her trauma) Raya’s world is under constant threat from creatures known as the Druun, whose touch turns any living creature to stone.

Distrustful but never unkind, Raya is on a self-motivated quest to find the dragon Sisu and the missing pieces of the gemstone that might destroy the Druun once and for all, and – like most modern princesses – has a skill-set that gets her where she wants to go. Having been trained as a guardian to the Dragon Gem throughout her childhood, she's in possession of a Cool Sword that doubles as a grappling hook and an adorable pangolin/pill-bug mount that rolls her across the landscapes of Kumandra.

Her trust issues are apparent from the beginning, having once made the mistake of showing Namaari, the princess of a rival kingdom, the secure cavern where the unbroken gem was kept. This lapse in judgement cost Raya her father, and is the inciting incident that sets her out on her eight-year quest.

There’s real poignancy in the fact she’s trying to right a wrong that was never really hers to fix in the first place, carrying the burden of her childhood mistake and the guilt that it’s causing so much pain and destruction across the world. Between Kelly Marie Tran’s voicework and Raya’s obvious trust issues, you can feel the deep weariness in the character’s soul.

It’s pretty intense for Disney, and perhaps it was just my imagination, but there seems to be subtext throughout the film suggesting that Raya doesn’t truly believe she’ll be able to fix the world. Rather, she’s trying anyway out of respect for her father’s last wishes, and because there is simply nothing left for her to live for. If I wanted to go really dark, I could posit that her final decision to give up the gem is less a leap of faith and more a final surrender.

I do wish they had handled her arc a little better, especially when it comes to her trust issues with Namaari, but she’s easily the best part of the film, and her long-awaited reunion with her father is a slam-dunk.