![]() 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. 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 two films also share weaknesses with regard to their mythological elements, particularly when it comes to archetypes of harmony and life on the one hand and chaos and destruction on the other. ( Moana’s milieu is Polynesian, Raya’s Southeast Asian.) Not only is Raya, like Moana, a mythic tale about an intrepid young princess leaving her homeland on a quest to save her world from an intangible menace, in both stories what broke the world was an act of greed for a magical stone. The more obvious point of comparison is Moana, Disney’s other action-princess movie with Asian-Pacific cultural and mythological roots.
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