Disney’s first Southeast Asian heroine has a moving adventure
The chief antagonist in “Raya and the Last Dragon,” an enjoyable new adventure from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is something called the Druun, a shrieking, sludgy purple monster that turns people to stone. It’s an archetypal formless villain, a distant cousin of supernatural scourges like the Nothing from “The Neverending Story,” but it also carries a whiff of realworld metaphor. No, the
Druun isn’t the coronavirus, even if it does leave broken societies, devastated families and tribalist impulses in its wake. One character calls it “a plague born from human discord,” which is to say it’s yet one more crushing reminder that we have met the enemy and he is us.
Or rather, she is us. Women rule, literally and figuratively, in “Raya and the Last Dragon,” starting with Raya, an intrepid warrior princess whom we first see riding through the desert like a bamboo-hatted Mad Max. The Druun has devastated her homeland, but Raya, voiced with pluck and determination by Kelly Marie Tran (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”), refuses to accept defeat. Armed with a powerful sword, an ancient scroll and a giant armadillo-like sidekick named Tuk Tuk (he’s her pet and her rolypoly mode of of transport), she travels the fantastical realm of Kumandra in search of answers, carrying nothing less than the weight of humanity on her red