Somehow, Heart wound up with the gem, to the resentment of the other lands. Squabbling over the Dragon Gem, the inhabitants of Kumandra fragmented into five rival lands, each with their own culture and style, named for parts of a dragon: Heart, Fang, Talon, Spine, and Tail. The malevolent power that we are told shattered Kumandra’s paradise was no demon, though it’s vaguely suggestive of an inchoate Balrog: a mindless, raging maelstrom of smoke and lilac-colored energy called the Druun that is able to reproduce, horrifyingly, by sweeping over human beings and turning them into stone.Įven the dragons were helpless against this menace - until the last dragon, Sisudatu, banished them (apparently extinguishing herself in the process) with a burst of the very last dragon-magic concentrated in a gemstone of power. Given the Asian milieu, it’s no surprise that the dragons we find in this paradise (via a rather dense prologue, animated in a flat style evocative of cutout paper puppetry) are not the malicious, fiery monsters of Western mythology, but benevolent beings associated with water and peace. Raya opens with a myth of paradise lost, set in the fantasy land of Kumandra. In both films the balance is upset and old hostilities between demographics are renewed, and the heroine must find a way to restore what was lost. While Zootopia is populated by anthropomorphic animals, its heroine, like Raya, inhabits a world of diverse realms and populations uneasily coexisting in the shadow of a dream of utopian harmony.
Just as notable, though, are ties to Zootopia. The lesson may be the same progressive pro-diversity theme at work in Zootopia and other recent Disney cartoons, but it’s a welcome surprise to find the young protagonist naively expressing narrow views and the tolerant parent gently prodding her in a more broad-minded direction - a pointed subversion of the overused Junior Knows Best dynamic dominating recent US animation.
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