107 min | PG | March 5, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
A land called Kumandra has spent five hundred years tearing itself apart over the shards of a broken gem, and one warrior hunts the last living dragon to put it back together. The world Disney builds is gorgeous and specific. The lesson it teaches you can see coming from three kingdoms away.
Kumandra is a broken land. Five nations carved from a civilization that once shared it, each named for a piece of a dead dragon. Five hundred years ago the dragons sacrificed themselves to stop the Druun, a plague that turns the living to stone. Raya is a warrior from the Heart nation who learns as a child that trust gets you destroyed. The film asks whether a person with every reason to trust no one can choose to trust anyway. Disney builds a quest around that question and never lets you forget what the question is.
Kelly Marie Tran plays Raya with a hard, guarded edge that the studio rarely grants its heroines. She is bitter and capable and slow to forgive, and Tran keeps the bitterness honest. Awkwafina plays Sisu, the last dragon, as an anxious optimist who would rather hand strangers a gift than raise a fist. The two characters spend the film arguing the same question from opposite ends, and the voice pairing makes the argument live. Gemma Chan plays Namaari, the Fang warrior who shadows Raya across the map, with enough conviction that the rivalry cuts both ways. Izaac Wang as the boy captain Boun and Benedict Wong as the giant Tong round out a road-trip crew assembled one broken kingdom at a time.
Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada direct from a script by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim that draws its world from Southeast Asian cultures. The action is the strongest craft on display. Raya’s fights move with the footwork and spacing of real martial arts, and the animators stage them as grounded combat instead of weightless spectacle. The production design gives each of the five nations its own palette and silhouette, so you always know which kingdom the journey has reached. The Druun read as roiling purple smoke, a threat with no face to fight, and that choice keeps the menace abstract and constant.
The world-building is the achievement here. The moral is the ceiling. Trust is the answer the film announces in its first act and spends two more proving, and the tidiness drains the tension from a story that wants you to doubt the outcome. The quest hits every beat you expect a quest to hit, in the order you expect it. What lingers is Kumandra itself, a setting rich and specific enough that you wish the film trusted it to carry a less predictable story. The craft outruns the screenplay, and that gap is the whole movie.