Disney's Raya And The Last Dragon

[James]

Raya’s RT score puts it in the top ten WDAS films ever made. I can see how some people might like the movie more than I did, so no problems agreeing to disagree about how good/bad it is. But top ten? That’s silly.

[EricJ]

A recent Disney/Pixar would have to be pretty bad NOT to score 90%+ on RT, and above-mediocre is still considered Good Enough for the majority of critics to give it a passing grade.

The problem in RT "Top ten" rankings is that it factors in audience response, which are fan submitted and can be as fan-skewed or current mania-skewed as laughable IMDb rankings, which throws off the score.
Obviously the fangirls have been a little more vocal on the fan-submitted Disney ratings for heroine-driven stories since Frozen, so Raya is going to get more of a positive push than Luca, but that's pretty much movie-by-movie, until the next one shows up.

[Ben]

Movies have become so bad in recent years that critics — and by that I mean professional critics and not webfans — have basically become numb to it all. The popular phrasing I often hear being used as an excuse is that a film is "okay", or "not as bad as it could have been". The bar is set remarkably low in this day and age, and there is a lot of mediocrity being accepted by audiences, and the critics just have to deal with it. Most films are not given massively enthusiastic reviews nor are they given slammingly bad reviews. Everything exists somewhere in the bland, homogenised middle where the bad is seen as good, and the good is seen as okay.

That’s not to say that I didn’t find Raya immensely entertaining though*.

*but it’s certainly not top ten Disney.

[Farerb]

What is top 10 Disney in your opinions?

[James]

That might be a better discussion for a dedicated thread rather than hijacking this one!

[Daniel]

Didn't much care for Raya. It was good, nothing amazing. Felt structured like a video game story.

[Farerb]

I agree about the video game aspect of it, I also dislike when animated films try too hard to imitate live action and don't take advantage of the medium, and it just makes me ask why not just do it in live action, it's easier. I feel the same about Lightyear, to be honest.

[Bill1978]

I enjoyed Raya thought it was good movie, my main issue with it was the extended prologue. While watching I enjoyed the explanation of the world and the past stuff etc but as the movie went on and they kept having flashbacks to the past and presenting it as some sort of big revelation to the plot I began to wonder why we even needed the extended prologue. I felt the movie would have been tighter and improved if they had either the extended prologue OR the flashbacks BUT not both. It's like the writer didn't trust the audience to remember things from the start of the movie.

[Ben]

I was going to say something about short attention spans, but can’t remember what it was I was going to say…

[EricJ]

Just bumping the thread for a halfway report:

For the past...how long has it been since Onward, again, two years?...I've been on a combination of not going to theaters, not giving Disney+ the satisfaction of "Premium streaming", and on a pre-cruise "Disney lockdown" where I avoid seeing the new movies until I can see them on vacation.
But now that I've given up and changed to a land vacation, it's okay, and now I've gotten a couple months of D+ to catch up on the one Disney, two Pixars and three Marvel movies I've missed in the meantime.

I started chronologically with Raya, and I have to agree with Daniel that it's "nothing special"…

I'll stick to general points:

- Unlike Merida, an "independent heroine" who ultimately realized it was her own independent stubbornness that caused the whole mess and had to fix it, we get hints that Raya is too burned by her past Game-of-Thrones betrayals and can't trust people, but the movie doesn't yet seem to see that as a problem: At the beginning, she says "I trusted the wrong people!", but there don't seem to be any right people, as everyone, even the freakin' babies, seem to be out to get her in the end. The movie's attempt to put Raya on a pedestal for young girls seems caught between "Teach the world to get along!", and "Girls who depend on others become victims!", which is rather hard to spiritually reconcile.

- Everyone seemed to have a problem with Sisu's "contemporary humor" being out of place, but given the rest of the faux-Airbender action, I was looking forward to it--I didn't have a problem in the past with Robin Williams as Genie or Eddie Murphy as Mushu, but I was struck how much more LIKABLE and sympathetic Genie was, and how much more USEFUL to the plot Mushu was in helping Mulan. I will give credit to Awkwafina for doing her killer imitation of a teen Phyllis Diller. (Sisu comes from the Heart kingdom, but good thing she wasn't married to Fang...HAAA-haha!)

...Forty-five minutes to go, and am I right in guessing even Surrogate Annoying Little Brother with the boat backstabs her too, in a crucial plot point?

[Ben]

Well, yes, apart from them *all* dying at the end…