Disney's Raya And The Last Dragon

[Ben]

This suddenly looks much more like a DWA film.

[Bill1978]

For some reason I get Dreamworks vibes from the additional characters. And still processing if that's a positive or a negative in my book.

[Ben]

Well it’s all a little bit derivative of How To Train Your Dragon, isn’t it? Not such a bad thing if it’s the first one, but not so much of a good thing if it’s the lesser sequels...!

[EricJ]

Uh, that wasn't the particular Chinese kung-fu-pandering DreamWorks movie that sprang to my vibes...

[Ben]

Hehehe..."panda"ing. You didn’t realise you made a funny!

[Daniel]

New poster:



Raya will be "free" to all subscribers starting June 4th. I'll wait.

[Ben]

Much nicer art, but I’m still not sold. At least if was a musical we’d have some new songs to look forward to.

[Randall]

Looks quite nice, but I can't get over my feeling of ambivalence on this one. Maybe I'm just not a dragon guy.

[Farerb]

[Daniel]

Yep, once you see it you can't unsee it - which is precisely why I didn't want to bring it up!

[Ben]

I guess the fur doesn’t bother her anyway.

[Farerb]

[Bill1978]

I think Disney needs to stop releasing new teasers cause they are turning me off. Well mainly The Last Dragon. It almost feels like two different movies - you have the epicness of Mulan with a splash of Pocahontas seriousness and then they slap the Genie from Aladdin in there. It's like tonal whiplash for me. The Genie's modern humour works in Aladdin as the movie is set up as a light heartedness rom com (basically). Here the humour is very jarring. Even the Gargoyles from Hunchback didn't feel this out of place.

[Farerb]

But Mulan had Mushu.

[Ben]

Okay, so for whatever reason, this ad above is the first bit of footage I’ve seen from this: I just haven’t been eager to check out the previous trailers, which I’ll go back and look at later.

So apart from the posters and images, which I haven’t been impressed by, this is the first footage I’ve seen of this and...my gosh it’s bad.

From the studio that brought you Frozen? Since when is Frozen a bigger draw than putting Disney above the title!? Even before that I couldn’t quite convince myself that I was watching a Disney product: in that initial shot of two characters fumbling something the animation looks *terrible*, especially coming after such highpoints as the human animation we've seen in the last few features going back to Tangled.

And then the "humor"...ugh. "Oh, we're doing a jumpy thing?" — that’s like a third rate carbon copy line from a third rate carbon copy animated film, not a big Disney feature. And then there’s no consequence because they then just continue the jumpy thing anyway, so why bother with the gag? Hilarious.

I’m with Bill. This is the first I’ve really seen of this and it’ll take a lot to get me on Raya's side. As for the Dragon, well at least Mushu had *personality*!!

Looks like a real hodge-podge. With the lack of buildup and marketing, it’s another example of Disney knowing they have a less than billion dollar grosser on their hands, where D+ makes the most sense. The $30 cost hopes to snag those that liked Newlan, and gives it the cache of being something more significant than it may be.