Disney is at it again, with their 58th animated feature, titled “Raya and the Last Dragon.” The film has an all-too-hip attitude to spare, filled with cool Tik-Tok dialogue and social media-approved political messaging. Piled with Pan-Asian folklore, ‘Raya’ is set during a plague (how apropos), and has a heroine (Kelly Marie Tran) whose lifelong pal is a pet pangolin, possibly the ugliest animal on this planet, cutesified by the Mouse House. They both go on a journey to find a gem whose shattered shards are owned by five mythic states — Fang, Talon, Tail and Spine — that broke up and took the names of the parts of a dragon. Raya has to figure out if there’s a surviving dragon, and if she can put the stone back together because, well duh, that’s how the plague will end. Riding her cute pangolin down rivers and streams, Raya does finally find a shape-shifting dragon — this is where Awkwafina, voicing the dragon, shows up to mimic the genius comedy relief Robin Williams brought to his Genie in 1993’s “Alladin.” Yeah, good luck with that. This “Mulan” meets PG “Tomb Raider” is a derivative mish-mash of genres ranging from martial arts, fantasy and, gulp, YA. The lesson here is simple: we need to trust and accept each other. There are no villains in ‘Raya’, just misunderstood people.
SCORE: C
Thatcher shows up on-screen for, at most, 10 seconds. She looks remarkably like Thatcher and comes off as almost too polished, non-human like. Further clues are pointing at AI.