#Deus ex dragon tooth movie#

The lesson may be the same progressive pro-diversity theme at work in Zootopia and other recent Disney cartoons, but itвЂ™s a welcome surprise to find the young protagonist naively expressing narrow views and the tolerant parent gently prodding her in a more broad-minded direction-a pointed subversion of the overused Junior Knows Best dynamic dominating recent US animation. In a striking exchange, Chief Benja explains to Raya how people of different lands wrongly assume things about one another. The story proper begins five hundred years later, with young Raya of Heart (exuberant Kelly Marie Tran of DisneyвЂ™s Star Wars sequels) eager to take her place at the side of her father, Chief Benja (warmly low-key Daniel Dae Kim), as guardian of the Dragon Gem.ДЇull of martial zeal, Raya sees the other lands as sinister enemies-and is aghast to learn that her idealistic father has called the lands together in the hope of overcoming their differences and reuniting Kumandra. Somehow, Heart wound up with the gem, to the resentment of the other lands. Squabbling over the Dragon Gem, the inhabitants of Kumandra fragmented into five rival lands, each with their own culture and style, named for parts of a dragon: Heart, Fang, Talon, Spine, and Tail. The malevolent power that we are told shattered KumandraвЂ™s paradise was no demon, though itвЂ™s vaguely suggestive of an inchoate Balrog: a mindless, raging maelstrom of smoke and lilac-colored energy called the Druun that is able to reproduce, horrifyingly, by sweeping over human beings and turning them into stone.Д®ven the dragons were helpless against this menace-until the last dragon, Sisudatu, banished them (apparently extinguishing herself in the process) with a burst of the very last dragon-magic concentrated in a gemstone of power. Given the Asian milieu, itвЂ™s no surprise that the dragons we find in this paradise (via a rather dense prologue, animated in a flat style evocative of cutout paper puppetry) are not the malicious, fiery monsters of Western mythology, but benevolent beings associated with water and peace. Raya opens with a myth of paradise lost, set in the fantasy land of Kumandra. In both films the balance is upset and old hostilities between demographics are renewed, and the heroine must find a way to restore what was lost. While Zootopia is populated by anthropomorphic animals, its heroine, like Raya, inhabits a world of diverse realms and populations uneasily coexisting in the shadow of a dream of utopian harmony. Just as notable, though, are ties to Zootopia. The two films also share weaknesses with regard to their mythological elements, particularly when it comes to archetypes of harmony and life on the one hand and chaos and destruction on the other. Not only is Raya, like Moana, a mythic tale about an intrepid young princess leaving her homeland on a quest to save her world from an intangible menace, in both stories what broke the world was an act of greed for a magical stone. ( MoanaвЂ™s milieu is Polynesian, RayaвЂ™s Southeast Asian.)

#Deus ex dragon tooth movie#

The more obvious point of comparison is Moana, DisneyвЂ™s other action-princess movie with Asian-Pacific cultural and mythological roots. The most illuminating points of comparison, though, may be a pair of five-year-old Disney movies- Moana and Zootopia-and the extent to which Raya and the Last Dragon can be seen as a mash-up of these two popular 2016 films says as much about the culture of ideas at work at Disney today as any film theyвЂ™ve released in the last five years. (For one thing, the plot takes the form of yet another Marvel-style scavenger-hunt to find and reunite magical stones of power.) If DisneyвЂ™s Raya and the Last Dragon seems familiar, that might be becauseвЂ¦well, because of echoes of a lot of things, really. Cover image: Raya and the Last Dragon, В© Disney