This trope is Truth in Television. Rays are generally curious and playful, and they're more likely to swim away from danger than attack.
Contrast Sinister Stingrays, its Unpleasant Animal Counterpart. Not to be confused with a mellow mantra, which you might use while meditating.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach: Captain Unohana is the gentle and graceful leader of the Fourth Division, which is devoted to healing, and is famed for her gentle spirit and powerful healing abilities. When she activates her Shikai, it manifests as an enormous ray that can carry multiple people in its stomach, where it heals them from even severe injuries. For most people, that's all they ever really know about her. However, this trope is subverted; a thousand years ago, Unohana was the first Kenpachi of the Eleventh Division, an Ax-Crazy murderer whose Bankai can create a blood-soaked arena that uses both blood and healing to create a vicious, never-ending battle. When she turned away from that violent path, she devoted herself solely to healing and using her Shikai in gentle ways to save lives.
- Pokémon: The Series: In the series of specials, "Where Are You Going, Eevee?", a Mantine rescues the protagonist Eevee, Sandy, after it's accidentally knocked off a boat by a passing Wailord. The Mantine then allows Sandy to "surf" on it and they even practice doing flips together.
Films — Animated
- Mr. Ray from Finding Nemo is the friendly teacher to all the kids in the Great Barrier Reef. He lets them ride on his back and sings songs about all the sea creatures. Early on in Finding Dory, he goes on a migration with several other spotted eagle rays and is enthusiastic to take the children on a field trip to educate them about migration.
- Moana: Grandma Tala has manta rays as an Animal Motif (including a tattoo of one on her back), and while she's the self-admitted "village crazy lady", she's also a wise and gentle mentor towards her granddaughter Moana. After she dies later in the film, her spirit comes back as a manta ray and gives Moana some helpful advice when she needs it.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: Ray Fillet, despite being an enemy of the turtles here as opposed to one of the allies per the norm (initially anyway), when he's not fighting the turtles or helping Superfly in his schemes, he's shown to be an all-around decent Gentle Giant with a penchant for spontaneously breaking out into song.
Films — Live-Action
- Ultraman Cosmos 2: The Blue Planet has a race of benevolent, friendly manta ray-based kaiju named Reija which are the allies of the Alien Gyasshis. The Reija usually serve as steeds to their masters and assists Ultraman Cosmos and humanity in the film's final battle against the Horde of Alien Locusts known as the Scorpiss.
Literature
- In Dr. Franklin's Island, Semi is turned into a plankton-eating fish that looks like a blue-backed manta ray about the size of a "flattened teenager", with only her eyes remaining recognizable. She's really a Mix-and-Match Critter, spliced with DNA from multiple fish species, and notes that there's a stinger in her strong, flexible tail. Knowing a bit about "devil rays", she muses that they can leap out of the water and crush small fishing boats underneath them, but she finds breaching like that way too dramatic to do often. When encouraging a guilty scientist to feel bad looking at her Semi says in narration that manta rays aren't known for being able to give a Death Glare, but she looked at him as meanly as she could.
Toys
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The heroic mutant Ray Fillet is a mutant manta ray. Despite being large and extremely strong and tough, he's usually depicted as having the personality of a laid-back Surfer Dude.
Video Games
- Campfire Cat Cafe & Snack Bar: One of the special NPCs is Flowy Mandy, an anthropomorphic manta ray with a calm expression. She dances for the player, causing more acorns (the game's currency) to appear.
- Deep Rock Galactic: Mobula Cave Angels are flying alien manta rays that float harmlessly high above certain underground caverns. The player dwarves are able to hitch rides underneath their claws and even control them.
- Mantas are among the first creatures you'll see in both Endless Ocean games, gliding majestically through the water without bothering a soul. Blue World even lets you watch a cutscene of a squadron of mantas engaged in a courtship "dance".
- Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future: Manta rays are harmless, and one is used to shield Ecco from a gigantic eel in one level.
- Far Cry 3 features Giant Manta Rays. Not only are they one of the few creatures in the game that won't attack you on sight, but the Flavor Text you get from killing one (snarkily provided by agent Willis) is rather complimentary of them.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Kojin of the Blue, who live in the Ruby Sea, tame manta rays to use as mounts to speed their way through the ocean. These rays are depicted as largely docile and help their masters find treasure. One quest even has the Player Character help a manta ray find a mate. Averted with the rays tamed by the Kojin of the Red, which are aggressive and will attack the player on sight.
- Freddi Fish: Ray from the first two games will give a helpful gizmo to Freddi and Luther provided they trade him something else for it.
- Pokémon: Several of Mantyke's Pokédex entries say it's friendly, likes to approach people on boats, and tourists love watching them swim near the surface. Its evolution Mantine has a symbiotic relationship with Remoraid, is described as "majestic" or "graceful" in many Pokédex entries, and are tame enough for people in Alola to ride them between islands as a sport.
- Sky: Children of the Light features these all over the place:
- Manta-like creatures of light first turn up substantially in the second realm of the game, the Daylight Prairie. In their debut area, the bells used to summon them have been silenced by darkness plants; after burning away the plants around each of the three bells, then lighting the candles beneath them, the chiming bells call a handful of large mantas from beneath the sea of clouds to carry you up to the temple.
- Daylight Prairie also has the Sanctuary Islands starting from the Season of Sanctuary, inhabited by small jellies and large mantas. One particularly large manta even flies in a patrolling loop around the summit of the main island.
- The Hidden Forest gains some in the Season of Flight, when the clouds pull back to reveal the Wind Paths, a series of islands that lead all over the kingdom of Sky.
- The Season of AURORA features the song ''Warrior of Love'', in which players can hitch a ride around the Valley of Triumph's Aviary room with a manta.
- The Vault of Knowledge takes the (candle) cake; like the Daylight Prairie, it also features manta-style beings, but this level's mantas are spirits of light that help ferry Skykids up through the floors of the Vault. They become increasingly common as you ascend, and as you near the Elder's resting place, you eventually encounter a positively colossal manta-like being who dwarfs even the one in the Sanctuary Islands.
- Big Man from Splatoon 3 is an anthropomorphic eagle ray, and the most easy-going and fun-loving member of Deep Cut. Unlike his co-stars, he doesn't even try to act tough in story mode.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic: Alderaan is inhabited by "thrantas", docile manta ray-like creatures that fly in the air rather than swim. They're commonly used as beasts of burden by the Alderaanians, including providing the in-game taxi service from any location other than the two factional spaceports (normally either a landspeeder, speeder bike, or skyhopper on other planets).
- The earlier game, Knights of the Old Republic also had thrantas flying around Dantooine, which were quite harmless compared to the Kath hounds.
- In some levels of Treasures of the Deep, the player can get off their submersible and ride on the back of a manta ray to find a hidden area with extra treasure.
- Subnautica has several ray-like creatures native to 4546B — Rabbit Rays, Jellyrays, Ghostrays, Crimson Rays, and even the flying Skyrays. They're all poisonous enough to be inedible, but they're also peaceful herbivores. Jellyrays and Ghostrays are particularly serene-looking, being highly bioluminescent. Below Zero introduces another couple species, Arrow Rays and Arctic Rays, but those are less mellow — Arctic Rays are carnivorous (though they only eat small fish and won't go after anything human-sized), and while Arrow Rays are actually edible, they'll attempt to fight back against anything trying to eat them.
- Super Mario 64: The manta ray in Dire, Dire Docks is completely harmless and even beneficial. It leaves behind a trail of bubble-rings, and if you swim through five of them in a row, you get a Power Star.
- New Super Mario Bros. Wii: World 5-5 is an Auto-Scrolling Level where you have to jump between numerous Jumbo Rays that fly past and serve as floating platforms.
Western Animation
- Fully averted in Beast Wars, which has the Maximal manta ray Depth Charge. Despite his docile beast mode, he is a very angry, very obsessed, and hopelessly broken Anti-Hero whose Revenge Before Reason attitude alienates his allies and leads him to a tragic but inevitable end, falling into a midpoint somewhere between the personalities of Batman and The Punisher.
- Star Wars has the Selkath, an anthropomorphic manta-like species from the planet Manaan. The entire species had a peaceful reputation throughout the galaxy, but by the time of the Clone Wars, a handful of Selkath Bounty Hunters such as Chata Hyoki and Mantu had ruined countless species' perception of their kind with their uncharacteristic brutality.
- A Wild Kratts episode focusing on sharks has a calming interlude with a manta ray (and a few remoras) where the brothers gush over its gentle majesty. Unfortunately, said gushing is cut short by the intrusion of a great white shark.
- One episode of The Wild Thornberrys has Eliza and her father Nigel attempting to film a school of manta rays, with the latter explaining that they are one of the sea's gentlest creatures although they were once mistaken for sea monsters.
