Disney's Raya and the Last Dragon

Which movie do you mean?

I mean that Zootopia is the last Disney movie I watched that feels mature, nuanced, and unconstrained by executive pressure.

I meant which M. Night film was referred to.

He's talking about The Last Airbender, almost certainly sarcastically given that movie's reception. That said, the similarities between Raya and Avatar are, in my opinion, too great to be a coincidence.

The premise of four nations divided by war?

A teenage hero destined to unite said nations in the face of a great evil?

A female protagonist who discovers a mystical half-human/half-divine being prophesied to save the world?

Creatures that are hybrids of real-world animals, one of which is the protagonist's loyal steed?

Disney has made movies that were. . . ahem, "inspired", by other animated works before (The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water) but this is probably the first time they've been so shameless about it.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 15th 2021 at 12:33:40 PM

Think Barnill is making a joke since M Night's film is godawful.

Oh, I see. I thought he might mean The Sixth Sense, because of its plot twist.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 15th 2021 at 7:48:14 PM

Well, this sort of brings me back to my earlier concerns about Raya not going as far as it could in terms of embracing its genre and not following a formula.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest American animated TV series of all time, yet no one has ever made anything else like it. It didn't usher in a new wave of complex, mature animated series. Episodic comedy series are still the norm, at least on network TV. So what does that have to do with Raya? A lot.

See, as we've established, Disney hasn't really stopped being formulaic with its animated movies. They stopped using their old formula— the "Broadway-style fairytale musical"— after the 90s, and started exploring other kinds of movies, but a new formula developed as a result, one I call the "Genre buddy comedy". And as mentioned before, these movies follow a common template— for example, they always have twist villains and heavy emphasis on comedy.

So that brings us to the comparisons between Raya and Avatar. If Raya is indeed taking cues from Avatar— and it looks like it very well might be— it looks like it will be a very watered-down version of the themes and tone that series had. This is less "Disney making an Avatar of its own" and more "Avatar if Disney had made it."

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 15th 2021 at 3:28:46 PM

I'd say that She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is pretty close to being "the next Avatar", with its teenage protagonists, overarching and complex plot, and a mix of comedy, drama and mature themes. I sometimes even called it jokingly "Avatar, but gay". ;)

But that has little to do with Raya and the Last Dragon, I just wanted to mention it.

There's also Onyx Equinox, which has been called the next Avatar, but more "mature" (the blood, gore and swearing variety of mature, mind you).

Sometimes I do wonder if "the next Avatar" is already here, and it's not being hyped as such yet because the target audience is, well, target-audience-aged. Most people yelling about it today were kids when ATLA was airing. Maybe in five years She-Ra will get a renaissance and all the adults that didn't watch it today go "huh...fair enough."

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 15th 2021 at 4:56:27 AM

> Sometimes I do wonder if "the next Avatar" is already here

I swear I keep hearing owl noises....coming from an Owl House somewhere

Edited by Ultimatum on Feb 15th 2021 at 11:01:20 AM

x5 So, back on topic, now do you understand why I'm concerned about the similarity to Avatar?

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 15th 2021 at 7:17:25 AM

I do, yes. It borrows the basic premise and aesthetics of Avatar, but uses it to tell a much more simple story, using the standard elements of their new formula. To me, "heroine looks for legendary supernatural creature, who is revealed to be a funny character but with insecurities, voiced by a famous comedian" already screams Moana. But we can't tell for sure until the movie comes out.

...Atlantis was clearly based off of Stargate (the movie, I mean), right down to having near identical plots. It's not Nadia — I've seen Nadia.

Also, from what I've heard the similarities between "Kimba" and "Simba" have been grossly overstated. Here's a review of the Disney movie that goes on a long rant about how the two stories are nothing alike except in the most superficial ways, and the whole thing was started by some jerk who was talking out his ass. At most, the studio knew of Kimba and snuck in a homage to it, but that's it.

For every in-depth review you can find claiming the Kimba thing is overstated, you can find another in-depth review claiming that it's genuine.

However, researching the issue as I have in the past, the general take I get from the Kimba situation is that there's maybe enough historical evidence to posit that it's true, and maybe enough historical grey area to posit that it isn't - and that either way, the people who could have made an issue of it noticed but didn't care enough to do so. So... meh. Either way, really.

To clarify, though: anyone who thinks the issue with Kimba is about the story being copied isn't really well versed. Nobody seriously thinks Lion King ripped off of Kimba's story, since the plot of the Lion King is obviously a riff on Hamlet (though there's the occasional accusation levied towards Scar and the hyenas). IIRC, the actual original point of contention was about the way the story beats were related via the animation and design choices.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Feb 16th 2021 at 5:25:56 AM

Be that as it may, it feels like Raya and the Last Dragon is borrowing even more from Avatar than The Lion King did from Kimba the White Lion.

IMO the movie would have to come out before we could say. Advertising can always be misleading.

What no? The only time Jungle Emperor have similar beats is from the 1997 OVA which came out after Lion King. Jungle Emperor, the original, can't have "the same beats" from the Lion King because it's episodic save for a few episodes.

On a tangent: I refuse to call it Kimba when being compared to TLK because of the stigma it has regarding ignorance it has on the subject.

Edited by Ookamikun on Feb 18th 2021 at 8:39:40 PM

Jungle Emperor is nothing like Lion King even discounting the plot. I wonder if people keep checking buzz articles about it or if they have bothered to even research episodes. Like, I swear the Kimba installments go from regular to straight-up insanity that Disney can not hope to match and there's zero similarities after a few episodes

Advertising can be misleading, but it would be very atypical for a movie to be so misleading about its content this close to its release. I remember when Moana was coming out, the first trailers made it out to be some kind of epic, serious fantasy story, but by a couple weeks before the movie came out, all the trailers were full of one-liners from The Rock. In other words, it's a pretty fair bet that the trailers we have now are an accurate representation of the movie.

And, as I'm never going to get tired of saying, that's a damn shame. There's so much more they could be doing with this premise. I don't think I've ever gone from excitement to disappointment over a Disney movie so quickly. Raya could have been something new. It could have completely disregarded the old formula, and established itself as a new kind of animated movie. That first trailer showed so much promise. It looked like it was going to be something new and different.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 18th 2021 at 8:41:30 AM

Speaking as someone who grew up in New Zealand, Moana could have been so much more.

But no, it's Disney's watered down version of Polynesian cultures and myths set in their overdone musical formula.

And that's what I'm afraid Raya is going to be, together with a watered-down version of the plot of Avatar.

I'm not mad, just disappointed. I thought Disney was better than this.

Yeah, same here.

Pretty much. It had insane things like civilizing animals. It was really trippy. The one movie they like to use to forcibly make a TLK comparison is the 1997 OVA "compression" which had out of context shots, and ironically had shots that were more inspired by TLK because it came out later.

I assumed the Kimba/Simba comparisons are simply because they both happened to be properties starring lions with similar sounding names.