Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Raya and the Last Dragon, that releases in theatres this Friday, travels to the fantasy world of Kumandra, where humans and dragons lived together long ago in harmony. But when an evil force threatened the land, the dragons sacrificed themselves to save humanity.

Now, 500 years later, that same evil has returned and it’s up to a lone warrior, Raya, to track down the legendary last dragon to restore the fractured land and its divided people. However, along her journey, she’ll learn that it’ll take more than a dragon to save the world — it’s going to take trust and teamwork as well. Raya and the Last Dragon features the voices of Kelly Marie Tran as Raya, a warrior whose wit is as sharp as her blade, and Awkwafina as the magical, mythical, self-deprecating dragon named Sisu.

The film is co-directed by Don Hall, the director of Disney’s Academy Award-winning Big Hero 6. “This is Raya’s journey of learning to trust, after her trust was so deeply broken when she was a child. There had been some great exploration by the team into the concept of unity and togetherness. but Carlos (Lopez Estrada, co-director) and I felt that honing in on the trust required to achieve unity would lay a firm groundwork from which to make every decision in our lead character’s journey,” says Hall.

Carlos Lopez Estrada, whose feature film directorial debut was the critically acclaimed Blindspotting, adds: “You can’t really get to unity without trust. And for Raya, it will take trusting a group of strangers if she is ever going to have a united Kumandra.”

Building Kumandra

Raya’s journey in the film takes her through the five lands of Kumandra, a fantasy world that forms the shape of a dragon: Heart, Raya’s home; Fang, surrounded by water; Spine, a remote land with people having little to no trust on any outsiders; Talon, which is at the crossroads of all five lands, and also a busy marketplace; and Tail, a deserted land. Each land in Kumandra has its own physical characteristics and each clan its own ethos. For the film-makers, the challenge was to create five completely different environments with varying structures and styles.

“We have a world made up of five different lands. That’s like designing five movies. They have five different natural environments, materials they build with, different colors the locals wear, different shape languages that are meaningful to them. For example, in the land of Heart, they are connected to the dragon and the dragon is connected to water, so buildings, rooms, and so on look more like a drop... they are round. Whereas in the land of Fang, they’re all about power, so the structures are powerful and

over-scale. Every one of these things have been thought through by our incredible visual development and production design team members and then carried through into the film,” says producer Osnat Shurer.

Voicing Raya

The directors were immensely impressed with how Kelly Marie Tran (inset) portrays the strong, independent character of Raya and fleshes out her emotion and vulnerabilities. Estrada says ,“Kelly brings so much emotion. She brings an edge that we didn’t know that we could find. And honestly when she started recording, it was an unforgettable moment because we felt like she fully embodied Raya, beyond our wildest dreams.” Kelly brings a buoyancy and likeability to the character,” adds Hall.

Courtesy: Walt Disney Animation Studios