Raya and the Last Dragon review – charming and stylish Disney tale
There’s been a predictable laze to much of Disney’s animated output in recent years, a staid reliance on the easy mass market appeal of the sequel. Finding Dory, Cars 3, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II: a production line of “more of the same” regurgitations that have made the few originals in the same period – Coco, Soul, Moana – feel that much greater in comparison. With the same studio also churning out Marvel and Star Wars follow-ups, prequels and adaptations at breathless pace, it’s made Disney feel more like a cold capitalist corporation than ever before.
The release of Raya and the Last Dragon is in no way going to reshape that broader view (Disney is after all a cold capitalist corporation) but it does serve as a reminder of the studio doing what it does best: transporting us to a beautifully crafted universe to tell a story that’s both involving and, vitally, fresh. It’s another victim of the pandemic, premiering in cinemas where possible but also on Disney+ with a lofty $30 price tag, a shame given the film’s lush visuals as well as its ability to prove that yet again, duh, diversity sells as its box office would have surely been substantial with enthused word of mouth propelling it long past opening weekend. It’s the story of Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), a young girl who lives in the fragmented world of Kumandra, split into different warring clans after the evil Druun led to the sacrifice of the dragons they had all once lived peacefully alongside. After an attempt at peace ends in tragedy, years later as a teen, Raya finds herself on a dangerous quest to bring everyone together with the help of the last dragon Sisu (Awkwafina).
Set in a fictionalised version of south-east Asia, the accompanying voice cast is made up almost entirely of actors of Asian descent (from Sandra Oh to Gemma Chan to Daniel Dae Kim) although there was some understandable frustration recently when people discovered that the actors are predominantly of east Asian heritage, a sign that for some at Disney, Asia is all the same. It’s an unfortunate misstep in what is otherwise another much-needed attempt at progress not just with its diverse cast and characters but also its positioning of a female lead. Raya is not only the driving force behind the action-led plot but she’s also without a love interest, focused on her family, her mission and her burgeoning friendship with Sisu. Tran’s steeliness is well-matched with Awkwafina’s brand of goofy comedy (she’s so well-suited to voice work that it makes sense she’ll be voicing a seagull in Disney’s upcoming Little Mermaid) and their buddy comedy back-and-forth is funny without bordering on the “this one’s for the adults” smugness that can often seep into post-Shrek animation.
It’s a stunningly intricate and immersive world and as Raya travels from clan to clan, directors Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada create unpredictable new elements for her to encounter, making it one of the most visually escapist Disney films for a good while. The design of the Druun is particularly effective, a horrifyingly undefined maelstrom of chaos, turning everything into stone, although I’d argue that the design of the dragons feels a little cheap in comparison to everything else, with Sisu looking a little too My Little Pony-adjacent to feel part of the awe-inspiring world around her. The script, from the Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim and playwright Qui Nguyen, like many Disney films, aims to offer some simple life lessons along with the adventure, urging unity over division and hope over fear, an interestingly timed plea as the US leaves the darkness of one presidency and aims to repair the wounds it’s deepened. Lim and Nguyen manage to infuse this message without it ever feeling preachy, in the same way that Inside Out could be used as a way of explaining mental health or Coco for death to a young viewer, there’s similar, if less potent, worth here with its view of politics. That might sound on paper a little too earnest but it’s handled with a light touch.
As with any form of quest narrative, there’s a familiar formula at play and as with any, especially latter-day, Disney animation, there’s a lurch toward the heartstrings in the finale. While some of the beats might be a little too predictable and while the emotional wallop at the end might be more of a gentle tap, Raya and the Last Dragon works for the most part, a charming, sweet-natured YA-leaning adventure that acts as proof that Disney needs to focus on moving forward rather than continuing to look back.
Raya and the Last Dragon is released in some cinemas and on Disney+ on 5 March
that I thought America didn’t know about”.
It’s an absorbing potted history of an innovative show and, at a time when the likes of Trevor Noah and Eric Andre are playing with the late-night rulebook, it serves as a reminder that Hall paved the way. “Something that I would whisper to you that I probably shouldn’t say out loud, is that now I see a lot of people – black and white – doing things that I started,” he says. “I really do think that I kind of broke the mould a little bit, and allowed people to do it their way.”
Hall says his career has been a series of happy accidents, but in reality he worked hard to craft those opportunities from an early age. As a child he admired Carson so much that he started practising magic and playing the drums because his idol had. He wrote in to The Tonight Show and tried to get himself booked as an 11-yearold (his mother kept the polite rejection letter for him). When he followed Hank’s advice and switched to standup comedy in Los Angeles, he took every opportunity he could, including filling in for Joan Rivers, who had just quit her talkshow on Fox. That successful spell as interim host led to his big, careerdefining break: The Arsenio Hall Show.
It is easy to forget now but in the late 80s and early 90s, Hall really did shift the needle on late night. Here was a 32-year-old without a huge profile prior to its launch, suddenly his show was bringing in $50m a year for Paramount, who picked up the series after Fox passed. In 1992 when, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton wanted to cement his reputation among young voters it was on Hall’s show that he famously chose to showcase his saxophone-playing. “[Hall] had a lock on the youth crowd, especially younger women,” wrote Bill Carter in his classic account of late-night television, The Late Shift. “Within months Hall was a phenomenon.”
But things didn’t last. “Like many acts that start off sizzling hot, Hall’s was tough to sustain with the hip crowd, who never finds anything hip for the long term.” With ratings low and the competition from Leno and Letterman intense, Hall stepped away from the show in the spring of 1994. “I just tried to create my own world,” says Hall of the show’s run. “I saw a void, and I tried to exploit that void.”
The other world Hall helped create was Zamunda, the fictional African country that Prince Akeem leaves to find a wife in Coming to America. Released at the peak of Eddie Murphy mania, the film was a huge hit, ending up the third-highest grossing film of 1988 in the US. Murphy and Hall are back for the sequel along with new additions such as Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones and Jermaine Fowler, whose characters travel to Zamunda in a reversal of the first film’s fish out of water storyline.
The version of Africa the sequel presents is an opulent place where elephants walk around perfectly manicured lawns and excess is par for the course. But the original film has been criticised for presenting Africa as “a place of feudal hierarchy [and] prefeminist sexual politics”, and the sequel is unlikely to silence critics, given an arranged marriage and patriarchal control are central to proceedings.
Hall seems genuinely perplexed by the criticism the original received. “You never saw positive images of black people on television when we were young,” he remembers. “Look, when a person like Trump gets to say what he thinks [about Africa], you hear words like ‘shithole’. We wanted to show the motherland as beautiful.”
So the jokes weren’t at the expense of Africans? “We wanted to make the people intelligent, wealthy and all these positive things along with the comedy and the love story,” Hall adds. “You’re gonna get criticised, but our purpose was to do really positive things.”
One of the criticisms that Hall continually faced in his talkshow-host career was that he was a lightweight, keener to have a laugh with the people he had on his sofa than get under their skin. Perhaps the most notorious example cited by critics is his sitdown with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader notorious for his antisemitic views – which he denies – including blaming Jews for everything from paedophilia in Hollywood to slavery. Hall says he prepared for Farrakhan’s appearance by asking the leader of the Jewish Defense League to help him craft the questions. He knew the risks, he says, and ultimately the interview was a chance to ask Farrakhan about topics such as the murder of Malcolm X, to which he has always been linked. “When he says something like he may have contributed to the atmosphere that killed Malcolm X, I never heard him say something like that before. And I thought that was important,” says Hall.
The LA Times didn’t agree, dismissing the interview as a “rout”. The incident, and the theory that it was what led to the show’s cancellation, has dogged Hall ever since, despite the fact that, keen to move away from the notoriously demanding world of late night, he had sent his resignation letter months before he booked Farrakhan.
“If you go in a barber shop now and you ask why The Arsenio Hall Show in the 90s got taken off the air, most people will not tell you: ‘He wrote a resignation letter because he wanted to do other things,’” says Hall, who sounds genuinely annoyed about the rumours. “‘He actually wanted to have a kid, and he wanted to act, and late night occupies every moment of your time.’ [Instead] if you go into a barber shop, they’ll tell you: ‘Y’know, white man took them off there because he interviewed that Farrakhan.’”
I try to move off the subject, but he comes back for another bite. “I’m probably not working today – in somebody’s mind – because of that interview, but, y’know, it just raises the wall for me and I’ve been jumping over walls all my life, so I’m good,” he adds, while not actually sounding that good. Still, Hall remains proud of his show’s legacy. He tells another story about the time he booked Bobby Brown and convinced execs to let him open the show with Don’t Be Cruel. One rule of late night was that you didn’t open with a musical number, which traditionally came toward the end of the show. But Hall did it anyway.
The more humble Hall falls away for a second as he recalls the impact that his bold choices made. “There was no YouTube, you couldn’t go pull up this and that or Google things. I was like Twitter spreading the shit,” he says. “I wasn’t a blue bird, I was a black bird: I was black Twitter.”
Even Hank might not have predicted that.
Coming 2 America is available on Amazon Prime Video
Hall of fame: five memorable Arsenio guests
Madonna (1990)
Hall caught Madge at her peak, both in terms of fame (just prior to the Blond Ambition tour) and capacity for outrage. On pugilistic form, she quizzed her host on his breakup with Paula Abdul, hinted at a romantic tryst between him and Eddie Murphy and even mocked his haircut (“No fades. It’s tired”). Hall, for once, was almost speechless.
Vanilla Ice (1991)
Genuine grillings were a rarity on Hall’s show, but he couldn’t resist taking aim at the rapper over some sketchy aspects of his backstory. Their tense face-off would be described by Entertainment Weekly as “nine of the most onerous minutes in television talk show history.”
Magic Johnson (1991)
NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s announcement that he was HIV positive served as a seismic cultural moment in the US, and it was inevitable that he’d choose close friend Hall to conduct the first interview in its wake. The pair would reunite for an information film on the virus a year later.
Bill Clinton (1992)
Looking to position himself as a hip alternative to presidential rival George HW Bush, Clinton rocked up with his sax. (“Good to see a Democrat blowing something other than the election,” Hall quipped.) Mocked at the time, it’s now seen as a game-changer for how politicians interact with the world of entertainment.
RuPaul (1993)
RuPaul considers his late-night debut as a breakthrough moment, when “the whole world got to see me”. He regaled the audience with tales of standing up to the Ku Klux Klan in full drag, quips such as “I’m a regular Joe … I just have the unique ability to accessorise”, and a barnstorming rendition of his hit single Supermodel (You Better Work). Gwilym Mumford
done for Hamlet at the Young Vic!
CJ: Hey, I can pull it out of my arse any time. Any time! I’m not going to lie to you: you know your process to get you ready, but you’re never really ready. You get all your armour on, and your jetpack and your grenades, and you pack an extra couple of sandwiches because you might get hungry. We’d cast everybody so it really bugged me that those actors had a job and then they didn’t. Who knows whether they’ll be available when we come back to it. The pandemic will change this Hamlet and will change every show that comes back on stage. It will change the way that someone watches a musical in the West End, what kind of content people want to see. When we re-approach Hamlet, hopefully at the end of the year, I’ll go back through everything and new stuff will spring up. Everybody’s different now. There are people who were going to come to my show who aren’t alive any more. It’s a different world.
CW: How does it feel to return to the same character? Anne-Marie, you played Lady Macbeth twice, five years apart.
AD: Yes – with a different husband on stage. That has an effect on you. It’s a different relationship. I was quite nervous about doing it again. Would I have run out of choices? I did Macbeth at Lincoln Center in New York in 2013 and then at the Olivier in 2018. I was the only Brit in the American production.
CJ: We bumped into each other in
Zara in New York, when you were on the way to rehearsals! That’s the first time we met in person.
AD: You were doing Julius Caesar at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. I was a different woman playing Lady Macbeth the second time round. That’s what great about what we do. And why you don’t want to overexpose yourself in terms of telling the world your private shit. You don’t want people to go: “Oh that’s why she’s made that choice – because of all these things in her life.” I would recommend actors revisit characters, ideally in a different production. It’s not easy because your first choices were made before, the quick ones. You have to plumb.
CJ: You see, this is what makes Anne-Marie an actor’s actor. She says that like it’s the most obvious thing in the world: “Oh, all your first choices!” She’s looking for what else is there – that takes lots of time and energy. It’s a risky thing to do.
AD: That’s the kind of actor you are! Forensic. Some actors you need to prod a bit; some just do it. Cush is a real storyteller, looking for more marrow in those bones.
CJ: And everyone else is saying: it’s done! It’s finished! Quick, everyone out before Cush comes up with another idea!
CW: You’ve returned to your Josephine Baker show, Josephine and I, over the years too.
CJ: There is another life happening for it which will involve us running the theatre show again. I always wanted to do it again because, just as Anne-Marie was saying, I was a totally different person when I first did it. I’d never been to New York when I wrote the show, then I ended up living in New York. And I’d had a line of terrible boyfriends and then I ended up with a really nice husband. I’d love to play Lady Macbeth one day. Some characters come and go; others infiltrate your life. My version of Josephine is one of those. She is often popping up to haunt me.
CW: You’ve both played Nora in A Doll’s House.
AD: I had terrible stage fright playing her. I had to have a word with myself about becoming too immersed in a character. It doesn’t make you better at your job – it’s serving nobody. You get these writers who are huge taskmasters like Ibsen and O’Neill. They are oceanic. If you allow yourself to drown in them it’s not wise. So at the Lowry in Salford in 2000 I walked offstage and Paterson Joseph just looked at me and put his hands on my shoulders and said: “There are so many hundreds of people out there, they’ve all paid for their tickets, AnneMarie Duff.” And I turned around and went back on stage, because suddenly it was tangible. That play is a real head fuck. As a young female it pushes you into a corner of yourself and makes you have to deal with your bravery.
CJ: The other thing that counsellor said to me is that when you’re playing a role, your brain knows you’re playing a character but your body doesn’t. When you become traumatised, the body keeps a memory. There’s only so long you can keep doing that. People who aren’t actors like to throw around these terms like “method acting” and “people who really go there”. It’s the finest line – you’re trying to go as far as you can within the role, and be the most authentic, but you’re trying to do all these other jobs at the same time. You still need to be accountable to your teammates and you need stamina to get through the run. You don’t want to collapse because you’re so completely in it. So for teammates, like Paterson, it’s about knowing when to help somebody. I’ve worked with some people who absolutely indulge in that blurriness to the point of negatively affecting the other cast members.
CW: When did you first feel exhilaration from acting?
AD: I remember getting the bus home from my very first job. I was skint, on Equity minimum, it was a small part. I cried with happiness. I thought: My god, I’m actually doing this. I’m actually acting for a living. I came from a world where it would be considered fucking stupid – dreaming of becoming a classical actor on a grey breezeblock council estate. I couldn’t believe my luck.
CJ: I was in Bugsy Malone in the West End as the cigarette girl. I was 11 turning 12. The first Friday they gave us a £50 note for expenses. I’d never seen a £50 note before. I was walking back to the station with this note in my backpack. And I thought: nobody knows that I’ve been in the West End! Every night I’d get out the tube and walk to the theatre and hope that someone saw me go in the stage door. Because they’d know I was a star!
AD: Can you imagine how giddy we’re all going to be when we’re back in theatres?
CJ: There’ll be so much love in the room. It’ll be like James Brown in that video, you know when he’s fainting when he goes off stage and they’re going: “It’s OK, James! It’s OK!” We’ll all be like that. But I also think people’s bullshit detectors are going to be slightly stronger. We’ve had a danger in the past of straying into the territory of: “Ah, that’s good enough, put it on.” Now, if people are going to go, and pay money they can afford less than before, they don’t want to feel like you think you’re smarter than them. I want to see a musical but I don’t want to feel slightly disappointed and ripped off. People will want us to really tell stories and not cut any corners. That’s a good challenge for the business.
AD: Being in a room when a dancer holds another dancer or an actor makes themselves vulnerable is going to be so potent. We’ve been behind masks for ages. It’s very powerful psychologically what that does to us – you can’t see me smile, can’t hear me properly. It will be amazing to hear someone play a guitar in front of you. The real world is what we do, but the arts are who we are.
CJ: There’ll be orgasms in the aisles! Cush Jumbo supports The Black Curriculum and Magic Breakfast. She stars in The Beast Must Die on BritBox this spring. Anne-Marie Duff supports the Theatre Artists Fund and Freelancers Make Theatre Work.
Scottish painter James Morrison died shortly before the completion of this affectionate documentary about his life and work, and it’s a fitting tribute to an articulate and self-effacing artist with an extraordinary affinity for Scotland’s everchanging landand seascapes. It’s directed by Anthony Baxter, best known for highlighting the stubborn local resistance resistance to Donald Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire with his You’ve Been Trumped films; this is something of a change of pace, while offering a notdissimilar celebration of a very Scottish style of quiet, unfussy determination.
Morrison’s story is interesting enough – born and raised in Glasgow, the son of ship’s fitter, who settled on the east coast and made epic trips to paint abroad, most notably to the Arctic – but it’s added to here by a plangent late-life twist: he is losing his sight, to the extent he can barely see what he is painting. True to form, Morrison accepted this as uncomplainingly as anything else – “irritating” is the strongest imprecation I can recall – and there’s something inexpressibly moving about the way he strokes a blank sheet of paper taped to his easel as if he can’t wait to get started.
This is by no means an emotionless film, however: Morrison talks passionately about his wife Dorothy, who died in 2015, and introduces us to a stormily epic landscape painting he calls “a portrait of grief”. In fact, all of Morrison’s work appears suffused with a kind of religious awe at his surroundings; Baxter artfully inserts beautiful drone shots of big skies, beetling cliffs and rolling hills as an echo of Morrison’s canvases. His Arctic sequence – huge chunks of ice, floating in intense dark blue seas – stands out in terms of spectacle, but Morrison preferred to talk in terms of his own “argument with himself”. As a painter, Morrison ought to be better known; this film should give his reputation and legacy a major uplift.
•Released on 5 March in virtual cinemas and digital platforms.