City native: Teamwork key to making ‘Raya’
Animated Disney feature was created amidst pandemic
The underlying themes of Disney’s latest animated feature, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” are trust and unity. Those ideas applied to the filmmakers as well.
The coronavirus pandemic rocked the world while “Raya” was being created a year ago. As a result, the majority of production occurred at the homes of more than 450 artists and crew members, who remotely contributed to the film.
This includes Disney Studios’ cohead of animation, Royal Oak native Amy Smeed.
“We completed almost 100 percent of the animation on this film working from home,” says Smeed, who lives in Burbank, Calif., with her husband and daughter. “We had just begun working on animation last March. We animated about five shots, then we were all sent home.
“At the beginning, we felt like, ‘Omigosh, how are we gonna do this?’
… Everything got figured out fairly quickly, and we were up and running fairly quickly.
Everybody from our department was willing to help out with the rest of the crew. Seeing that teamwork and camaraderie is something we have on every film, but it was elevated quite a bit on this one.”
An alumna of Kimball High School in Royal Oak (closed in 2006) and the eldest of three siblings, Smeed earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in computer graphics from the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her career at Disney in 1998, where she’s worked on the animated features “Bolt,” “Tangled,” “Wreck-It Ralph,” Oscar-winner “Frozen” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”
“I grew up watching the Disney movies,” she says. “Usually, Disney would have a Thanksgiving release every year. My uncle would take my sisters, my cousins, and I to whatever that film was. I don’t think I ever pictured myself being an animator at that point in my life. I was watching these films without realizing it was a career path for me to take. It seemed all magic to me.”
Disney’s 59th animated film, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” was released in theaters and streamed on Disney+ this weekend. The voice cast includes Kelly Marie Tran (“The Last Jedi”), Awkwafina, Daniel Dae Kim, Gemma Chan, Sandra Oh, Benedict Wong and Alan Tudyk.
“Raya” is set in the mystical world of Kumandra, where humans and dragons once lived together in harmony. When an evil entity called the Druun threatened Kumandra, the dragons sacrificed themselves to save humanity. In the aftermath, humanity became distrustful of each other and splintered off into five warring tribes: Fang, Talon, Heart, Tail and Spine.
Now, 500 years later, the Druun has returned, turning people into stone. It falls to Raya (Tran) and the last dragon Sisu (Awkwafina) to stop the Druun. But they can’t do it alone — they need help from the various tribes, including Raya’s bitter rival, Namaari. They must put aside their enmity and trust one another if they are to save the world.
“One of the things I loved about this film is it’s inspired by Southeast Asian cultures. Just learning more about that was a great experience,” Smeed says. “There’s a lot of action scenes between Raya and Namaari. One of our writers, Qui Nguyen, specializes in martial arts. … It was interesting for us to learn (about different styles of martial arts). We also had a fight choreographer, Maggie Macdonald, help us choreograph the fight scenes. She was invaluable. None of our animators specialize in martial arts, so having her record references for us to look at helped us be very specific with the action sequences.”
Smeed and the animation department spent seven to nine months creating the main characters in a painstaking, detail-oriented process. Then they worked on performance tests with the characters.
“There’s something about animation where you’re bringing life to these characters,” she says. “When we’re in pre-production, we try to get inside their heads and figure out what are we looking at from a story standpoint with the actors and the performance the (directors) are looking for as we’re starting to develop these characters. … Our studio is super-collaborative, which I love about Disney. We work really closely together.”