First Impressions: Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

So, Raya and the Last Dragon finally got out of Premier Access. Yeah, this one was a bit late, but Disney's decision to put films on Disney+ behind a paywall is legitimately one of those things I can criticize the service for. Like, we're already paying for the service, why must we pay extra to see a movie? I could have bought the movie on DVD but I wasn't gonna shell out forty bucks for this movie. Still, it is embarrassing how late I am to the punch on this one, but at least I have an excuse, I still need to cover The Mitchell's Vs the Machines and I have no excuse for why I'm late on that one.

So, Raya and the Last Dragon is... fine. It is perfectly fine, not a bad movie, I don't think it is anything spectacular, but it was fine. Yet, it is undeniably a Disney movie.

I think I should talk about what I did like about the movie, and there is a bit. There were some moments that I did enjoy, some scenes I thought were really well done, and actually took me into the movie a lot more. I don't think these scenes will really get up there for my favourite movie moments, but like, that is comparing to some of the timeless masterpieces which I don't think is really fair to this movie yet, a wine does have to age before it becomes fine after all. I also did like the design of the dragons, I don't think they're my favourite dragon designs, but they are unique, I don't see a lot of furry dragons... don't take that out of context.

I think the main story elements like the plot, characters and world building are all fine. The performances were good and the animation was not bad. I feel like this is one of those movies where a home release really kills it, some of the scenes, even ones I really liked, probably would have been better on a giant screen with surround sound in a specifically engineered room to optimize the viewing experience. In other words, this is a theater movie, through and through.

I guess it does make sense to make more of these "Theater movies" now since home theaters are becoming a reality and televisions are getting bigger and bigger. The thing is though, while these movies look and sound great in a theater environment, the same cannot be said for home environments, or travel environments, or really any place you might watch a a movie that is not the theater. Once in this movie I thought back to Abominable, which I liked, but had to admit a lot of that was because I did see it in the theater, it was a movie that needed the big screen and completely encompassing audio to mask what was, ultimately a rather simple story. I do feel Raya is, at the very least, in the same category of films, where they mostly live off the experience in the theaters.

Of course, I also can't deny that this is a Disney movie, through and through. Now, I love Disney, I literally have to stop myself from just going through every single Disney movie in a row on this blog. I grew up with Disney movies and TV, and at least a quarter of my favourite movies were made or owned by Disney. I do love Disney... but they have an undeniable formula, they love to hit on familiar beats and you do catch on quick. If there is a trope or cliché that people are familiar with in Disney movies, chances are it appears in this one. This does include the fast talking comic relief, who... I mean, it kind of was cool that she was also the powerful McGuffin of the movie, but I still didn't find her that amusing. Really I didn't find the movie that funny, I only laughed at one moment, but this isn't a comedy, it's an action/adventure movie. The fight scenes were okay, the editing on the first one was terrible, but overall they weren't bad, just not my favourite moments.

Though, all of that being said, I may be looking at this movie with bitter eyes. Yes, I am a critic so I should be able to slide personal stuff aside, but firstly, screw that nonsense, I am a person and my opinions can not only change, but also be swayed by outside influences. I want to embrace that, but secondly, I want to be totally fair to this movie, I want to lay my biases out in the open because I want to be fair to every movie I look at. So, let's talk about Nimona.

Salt in the wound here, as I am still a bit upset about the cancellation of Nimona, and it really was not this movie's fault that it came out during that whole debacle. I also don't want to make it seem like Raya is the only movie that Disney released recently that is covered by that particular shadow, the newest release of Cruella did bring up Nimona once more, for me at least, but it still is really upsetting that Disney released this movie behind a paywall around the same time they cancelled a movie that lots of people were excited for. I kind of went into this movie expecting a typical Disney affair, and I got a typical Disney affair, which is not the movie I needed in Nimona's place.

Yet, all of that having been said, Raya and the Last Dragon is still a fine movie. I don't think it is a bad movie, I think it is fine. If you have kids, they'll probably enjoy it more than I did, if you love everything Disney puts out, you should probably get some help, but you'll enjoy it more than me as well. I think most people will enjoy it more than me, I can admit when I am off the ball. There were some scenes I liked, and I do think the message of unity is very pertinent in this moment of history, though I'd also recommend watching Fraggle Rock for that message. Overall, I may be casting some unnecessary glares at this movie, I may unfairly bring up an issue that is not this movie's fault, and I may not think it is particularly great, but I would be wrong if I did not on some level recommend it. It is fine, it is a passable movie that will do more for other people, I'll admit that.

The Adventures of Tintin (AKA: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn) (2011) - A fine adventure for fans and newcomers alike

So, I said I was gonna try and review older movies this year. I am not backing out of my promise, I am still going to try and review movies from the 1990s and before, but I think I should be allowed some leeway here. Especially since 2011 was ten years ago, my does time fly. I figured since I had the opportunity I should give this movie a go, especially since I am a big Tintin fan. When I was a kid, there was this channel called "Teletoon Retro", it was pretty much Boomerang for you readers with Cartoon Network, it played all of the old kids shows and is where I first discovered such wonderful shows like Fraggle Rock, Rocket Robin Hood, and of course, The Adventures of Tintin. After that I read some of the comics, and I really love them. They're definitely my favourite comics and I kind of wish someone took the license and made more of them, I dunno maybe Dark Horse or IDW, but regardless, given my enjoyment of the franchise, how does the movie hold up?

The plot follows Tintin, an English reporter, as he tries to figure out what makes a model ship he purchased so alluring to others, a model ship that gets him kidnapped, introduces him to the drunkard Captain Haddock, and takes him to the Middle East to find the secret that these model ships are holding. It's kind of an amalgamation of different Tintin comics, The Secret of the Unicorn most notably, but with elements of a few others. Overall I do think that the plot moves along solidly, being an adventure/mystery movie I feel both elements are done very well and in keeping with the comics, well sort of.

Watching this movie, it really does highlight the differences in expectations between comics and cinema. Comic audiences don't typically expect long, epic chase sequences, thrilling and exciting action scenes. This is because of the fundamental differences between the comic and cinema mediums. Comic books are not very long, sure you have graphic novels and manga, but other comic books, especially the serialized ones, like the superhero and Tintin comics, are rather short affairs. For the most part (From my bare minimum of research so feel free to correct me in the comments) Tintin comics are 62 pages long, with a few exceptions, notably the first book which is 141 pages long. Even so, the amount of action you can convey is limited, so a chase scene would need to be a handful of panels, a page at most if you can get away with it. With cinema, that handful of panels to a page can be translated to two to five minutes maybe, so you can get away with some of the flowing camera work and more... outlandish elements that this film gets away with.

I am rather split on the action scenes in the movie. The chase seen in Bagghar was pretty well done, if a bit more destructive than I think would happen in a regular Tintin comic. The crane duel between Haddock and Sakharine though, that was just stupid. I'm also not a huge fan of the camera flow in the chase scenes, maybe that is just a me thing.

I think this transitions decently well into the animation which... is a mixed bag. On one hand, the movie looks incredible. The lighting and the textures almost made me think this film was shot live action, which can be a problem, you know this is animation, but I think the characters were exaggerated enough to make it not too realistic. In fact, that character design is really good, Haddock looked just like a three-dimensional, more realistic version of Haddock would look like, Thomson and Thompson looked great, but on the other hand I think they erm... well reduced Madame Castafiore's size a bit, and gave her a different nose, and as for Tintin, some of his facial expressions looked really off to me, that may just be a me thing, but some of his looks just gave an uncanny valley kind of vibe.

Character wise, they're all the same characters you know and love from the original comics. Tintin is a curious and determined fellow that tends not to go down without a fight. Captain Haddock is a drunken excitable man of action, and Thomson and Thompson are the same bumbling police officers they were in the comics. They included Madame Castafiore in the movie as a bit of fan service, personally I would have also enjoyed to see Professor Calculus as he is one of my favourite characters. Overall though, the characters have largely been unchanged, and the voice cast did a decent job as well. Andy Serkis was really good as Haddock, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg worked great as Thomson and Thompson, even if they probably only got the role because of Hot Fuzz, let's be honest. I think my only real complaint is Jamie Bell as Tintin, but that is definitely a me thing. See, I grew up with the 1990s animated series, which (if you were an English speaker like me) had voice actor Colin O'Meara as Tintin, and that obviously not at all British voice is the voice I most associate with the character. Again, totally a me thing, and Jamie Bell did an excellent performance, I'm just used to the voice I grew up with.

Over all The Adventures of Tintin was a fine movie. Unlike Coraline, it does translate what I liked about the comics to the big screen. I really should stop being so mean to Coraline. Anyway, while I do have my issues with the movie, it had some good action scenes, a solid mystery, faithful characterizations, and had some genuine moments of good humour. I think whether you're a fan of the comics, or are a newcomer to the series, you'll get something out of this movie. While I don't think it's one of my favourite movies, I am glad I saw it. Solid recommendation. Maybe I should try to find the other Tintin movies as well.

Editorial: A statement

 This is just a brief statement.

Recently on Twitter, The Guardian made the hot take that Shrek was not a good movie. Someone else went further and made the statement that most kids movies were terrible, even naming things like Up and Wall-E.

This is the type of view that I am fighting.

I predominately look at animated movies because of the stigma that is attached to animation, but I now realize that this stigma goes beyond animation, it goes beyond film, it goes beyond art itself. This is a stigma attached to children.

This stigma is that children do not see or understand quality, they see marketable characters, pretty colours and toilet humour. Yes, these things do appeal to kids, not to every kid, but to lots of kids. To deny that is to deny that people still watch The Simpsons or Family Guy, we may not like to admit it, but it is true. That being said, children can see past marketability, pretty colours and toilet humour. Kids can see depth, kids can see nuance, kids CAN SEE QUALITY.

If I can use myself as an example, I was about twelve years old when The King's Speech came out, might have watched it at thirteen. The King's Speech is not a kids film, it is a historical drama about the British monarch King George VI during a time of trial for him. I first watched it at thirteen at the youngest, and it is one of my favourite movies of all time, and I knew it back then as well.

I was also incredibly young when I first watched "First Blood", "Terminator 2" and "Tombstone" three more of my favourite movies. Quality films, and if I were a dumb kid that didn't see past "entertainment value" First Blood would have bored me to tears, Terminator 2 would have bored me to tears, and I could not take my eyes off that move at first.

The biggest insult there is, is to equate being a kid to being stupid. Kids are a lot smarter than most adults, because kids are naturally curious, willing to ask any question. Adults love to stamp that curiosity out of their head, putting them in an unstimulating environment that is rife with bullying and terrible people that forces them into an outdated system that values them on their ability to regurgitate information rather than learn information.

I want to make it clear; Anyone, and I do mean ANYONE, that disregards kids films or any other media geared towards kids, has no respect for kids or the media they claim to love. Movies made for kids are still movies, video games made for kids are still video games.

I want this stigma to stop. I do believe that kids media should be respected, but beyond that, kids need to be better respected. The idea that kids will accept shoddy quality because their kids is wrong. The notion that you can put little effort into a kids movie is equally wrong.

My goal with this blog is to make animation a more respected medium, and I want it known that while animation doesn't just mean kids movies, the two do go hand in hand often.

That is all I have to say about that.

Editorial: My favourite Live Action/animation mix movie

 

Live action mixing has been a staple of animation pretty much since the beginning. In 1900, a man named J. Stuart Blackton filmed himself drawing a face on some paper and interacting with it. Pulling things off the paper and putting them back. Like wise, some of the earliest shorts were forms of live action mixing as well, with Disney's earliest short films being the Alice Comedies (As pictured above) and the first warner bros short technically being another live action mix, Bosco: The Talk Ink-Boy. Live action mixing is a part of the industry, and it would be dumb for me to ignore it completely. That being said, most mixes are mostly animated characters in live action worlds, so I do hesitate to talk about them on this blog. That being said, I really wanted to talk about my favourite of these movies.

Released by Disney in the 1980s, it features a man trying to solve a mystery and having to be sucked into an animated world. It was groundbreaking for its effects, has a loving fanbase and may just be the greatest movie Disney ever released, that's right!

Yep, my favourite Live-Action/Animation hybrid is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although that is also one of my favourite movies ever, but for my money, my favourite is 1982's TRON.

TRON is just an incredible movie, being one of the first movies to really create a new world in CGI. Even though by today's standards the effects are really bad, they still add a level of charm to this movie. People forget that if there was going to be a world inside of a computer in the 1980s, it would definitely look like this would, with that sort of plasticy, gummy looking CG. Even taking that out of the picture, the movie looks amazing, there are plenty of shots that look like album covers for prog rock bands, maybe something like Yes or Rush, maybe even Tool.

Really I'm a big sucker for historically significant pieces of media, I love looking at media history. Movies, Animation, Video Games, Music, I love it all.

TRON was a very ambitious movie for its time, as CG was not really used for such big projects. There were computer generated shorts, but a lot of them were more experiments to see what was possible with this kind of technology. Not to knock the importance of shorts like 1968's "Kitten" or 1971's "Metadata", but they weren't mainstream cinematic movies. There really wasn't any movie that really surrounded itself with CG at the time.

Keep in mind, this predated a lot of the movies that Disney would put CG effects in, predating The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. Really, this might have been the catalyst for other CG effects for Disney. Then again, I could just be talking up this movie too much. It isn't like this movie was really appreciated at the time. It was a bit of a box-office flop and wasn't even recognized for best visual effects in the Academy Awards, with the 1982 award going to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Then again, it isn't like the Academy is really known for either foresight or being right about anything.

I think most people view the movie as an effects over story or characters kind of movie. Personally, I can't really agree with that. Yeah, the story is a bit weak, but that is kind of the thing with a lot of adventure films, the story does tend to take a backseat to the locations. TRON doesn't really do this, it does not forget that these guys have a mission and need to get to the destination. One of my friends did mention that the movie felt a bit confused as to who the protagonist really was, but I never really felt that way. While we do focus on one character a lot, I don't think the movie ever forgets that this is still the other characters story.

So, now the question really comes in; Does this movie technically count as a Live-Action/Animation hybrid? To which I have to answer... it depends on how you see it? It is still live action people interacting in an animated world, but unlike Blue's Clues, there are really only two characters that are fully animated, a minority in the movie. Still, a majority of the movie is set in this animated world, and the most memorable scenes are in there too. So, while some may not consider it to be a true mix, personally I think that just enough is set in an animated world to count.

This really wasn't a review, it was just kind of me talking about one of my all time favourite movies. I've been watching a lot of movies lately and I was just kind of in the mood. I dunno, maybe I'll talk about my all time favourite movies in a separate blog someday. Until then, go see TRON if you haven't already, and if you want to know my thoughts on the sequel... I haven't seen it in years, but I remember not liking it all that much. Maybe someday I'll give it another go.

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) - Weird, bizarre, over-stimulating... and one of a kind.

I'll be honest, for the most part I try to avoid reviewing movies I don't actually own copies of, there are exceptions of course, but generally if a blog has the "Review" tag, that typically means I own a copy. I can really only think of two instances where I decided to review something despite not owning a physical release of the movie. The first was "Duck Duck Goose" which was a Netflix original and then there was "The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut", which I don't think has a physical release. Well, I am going to add another film onto that list, and what a coincidence that I mention The Thief and the Cobbler because this movie was also directed by Richard Williams.

I think Richard Williams is in that grey zone where people know him and his work, but he isn't a big name like Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki or even Ub Iwerks. He's done a lot of fantastic stuff and I really think all of his work is worth checking out just for the animation alone. However, I do have to look beyond the animation and see if the movies have more to offer, so, for no real reason whatsoever, I just felt like it, let's take a look at the 1977 box office flop that is Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.

In a small room lives a group of dolls, which include Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy, owned by a young girl named Marcella. One day, Marcella's birthday, she gets a new doll from Paris named Babette. Unfortunately, one of the denizens of Marcella's playroom, a pirate in a snow globe named The Captain, kidnaps the French doll and Ann and Andy have to rescue her, coming across bizarre and nonsensical locations and characters along the way. So yeah, this is a pretty typical animated adventure flick, and much like Yellow Submarine, it's more focused on the locations than the plot. That being said, the plot is... not exactly very clean. They kind of just randomly appear in locations, literally one character pops out and chases them into a different place, and after that we find the Captain's ship and see that Babette is now the captain and... I guess in the long run it isn't a messy plot, it is easy enough to follow and is, at its core, easy enough to understand. I guess I'll give it a C grade for plot.

Animation wise, well it's a Richard Williams production, the animation is wonderful. Now, I watched a 35mm Film transfer from YouTube, so the quality may have been affected by that. That being said though, the animation is energetic, fluid and smooth. Raggedy Andy's movements during his song number, when he is twisting himself all over was almost hypnotic to watch, and The Greedy is just beautifully animated, always morphing and melting. In fact, the animation may be too energetic. There is always something moving and it can be a bit over-stimulating. There are times when it does slow down and keep everything subdued, but lots of the song sequences and The Greedys scene have lots of movements and while it kept me interested, it was also really exhausting. It's all amazing animation, but it really can be overstimulating.

The audio can be overstimulating too. Looney Land especially is over-stimulating to the nth degree. Everything is laughing, so many sounds play out and the music is going, and it gets too much too fast. In fact, most of the audio in this movie is mixed. On the one hand, it does have some nice songs, "No Girl's Toy" is fun and a lot of people seem to like "Blue" and "Rag Dolly", which aren't bad, but this movie has the same problem, the exact same problem as the Steven Universe movie and Arlo the Alligator Boy. Too many songs that aren't spaced out enough. At least the songs aren't too bad, though a lot of them are very unnecessary. It also doesn't help that the singing voices aren't always great. While Mark Baker does an excellent job as Raggedy Andy, a performance that lots of viewers have literally fallen in love with, Didi Conn's Raggedy Ann is... Well, she can't exactly hit a lot of the notes the songs require her to hit, which is probably why people remember "Rag Dolly" over her first song "What Do I See?".

The characters are for the most part, very simple. I don't know if that is really a criticism or not because most of these characters are not really major, The Greedy is gross and a big eater, the Camel with Wrinkled Knees is lonely and miserable, Leonard Looney is unforgivingly annoying, Looney Land's King is small and angry, no character really gets a lot of... well character. Even our leads, Raggedy Ann and Andy have rather basic character. They weren't completely boring to watch, they weren't ever unengaging, so for characters I'd give this movie half marks.

In fact, I'd say this movie as a whole deserves half-marks. It's not paced very well, its plot isn't very fleshed out, the songs are too numerous and too inconsistent in quality, the animation and audio can be over stimulating, the characters aren't very complex... But this movie is one of a kind.

I know I brought up Yellow Submarine, which I do think is a better movie, but Yellow Submarine did not have this level of animation, this level of bizarre stuff happening, this level of "I don't even know what to describe". It's like Yellow Submarine dialed up to twelve. So, on some level I can recommend this movie and can even see people enjoying it. It's definitely one of a kind, and worth seeing at least once. That being said, it still has plenty of problems that can make watching it a more negative experience, so if the problems sound too much for you, I don't think you're going to miss a whole lot. So I can't fully recommend it, but I thankfully have a rating for films like this. I think this may actually be the perfect example of a "Slight Recommendation".