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Though Disney villains like Cruella de Vil and Maleficent continue to be popular, the studio’s more recent movies have done away with the traditional baddie, finding more threatening adversaries in natural forces like in Frozen 2 and Moana or whodunnit twists in Big Hero 6 and Zootopia. Raya and Namaari have a unique relationship for a Disney movie. The more archetypical evil villain didn’t suit her tale. But Lim says that when they dove deeper into the character and chose to give her a connection to Raya, she evolved into a more nuanced and ultimately sympathetic character.
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At one point, Namaari controlled the Druun and was more of a traditional Disney villain. The decision to complicate Namaari as a character - and develop her unique relationship with Raya - ended up affecting the Druun themselves. “The more we thought about it, the more we dug deeper into the kind of story we wanted to tell, we knew it was important that it’s about humans,” Shurer says. Shurer says that in the early stages of the film the faceless villains were more sentient and fightable. They are a faceless, mindless entity that seeks to turn humanity to ash and can’t be slayed by traditional weapons But they didn’t start out that way. The Druun that plague Komandra and turn the civilians to stone don’t have any sort of agenda. The idea of connection and trust fueled the movie’s creative direction, and informed many of the big choices that the filmmakers made - including the ending, which ultimately changed to fit where the story wound up going, Lim and producer Osnat Shurer tell Polygon. Sisu, the mystical last dragon of the movie’s title, instead inspires Raya to bond with those she once considered enemies. The dragon does something much more profound,” explains screenwriter Adele Lim.
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“She thinks she’s going to awaken a dragon, and the dragon will solve all the world’s problems. In the very beginning of the movie, Raya is a lone warrior on a mission to revive the last dragon.īut from the get go, the filmmakers behind Raya intended to subvert the Chosen One narrative. Disney’s newest animated movie, Raya and the Last Dragon, sets up a solo hero on a quest to save the fantasy world of Komandra from the Druun, a mindless swarm that consumes everything in its path.
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