Saving the world, again — but this time with a kickass baby, three monkeys, one soup chef, a 12-year-old overgrown man-child, and a My Little Pony enthusiast.

Raya wasn’t the best thing I’ve seen from Disney, but not the worst. To start 2021 off, this was a disappointment for me. Not only did the animation at points look rushed — clay and/or plastic textures — but the detail Disney has dumped into its movies throughout previous years was simply not here.

Barely beyond the edge of generic, characters with extremely simple and almost mind-numbing arcs stumble through a story that feels like an excuse to add filler rather than progress anything meaningful. Character traits scarcely change while lessons are being “learned,” and we get to know one thing though — the classic power of friendship defeats all evil.

Way to go.

Remember My Little Pony? You’ll get massive nostalgia from this copy-and-paste character design, so no need to worry about children’s appeal. Which, if we’re being honest, the audience for this is definitely younger children. Now, I don’t want to get too much into the depth of the story because I’m sure Southwest Asia — where this film took most of its influence from — has different ways of thinking (duh, that’s what culture is) than the Western world. But that doesn’t mean I have to necessarily like it. (The story, not the culture — calm down.)

As you can pretty much guess at this point — I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like the antagonist. I didn’t like the moral ambition to “do good.” I didn’t like the shallow portrayal of honesty. I didn’t like the empty save-the-world mentality of “help thy neighbor.”

There’s nothing very positive I have to say about this film. It simply lacked everything that would have made it enjoyable. The soundtrack even fell on deaf ears — none of us even remember when it really impacted the film or moved a specific idea or scene forward.

The so-called complex issues the characters needed to face have been shown so many times before, and it felt like I was just watching a recycled Moana — but this time done by an up-and-coming animation studio trying to capitalize on a marketable copy. To be real, they felt like petty drama if nothing else. Sure, this is a metaphor for our broken society — that we all have to work together to achieve blah blah blah —

But come on, Disney.

Children get these moral values fed to them through TV and other influential propaganda they eat up all day being this heavily exposed to media outlets. Doing something original would have been so much more interesting — and rewarding — for the viewer. Now, all you turnips who are gonna say something like “Oh, this is for kids, why are you so high-strung about it?” — just… perish. You all know damn well Disney is not only for kids, and the films they release are not only for kids.

I enjoyed that every female character was a strong, independent woman who could handle it all — but didn’t like the sting in the back of my throat that the guys were, well — dull, stupid brutes, or simply irrelevant. Besides the obvious exception of her father, the rest of the male cast was comedic relief — or at best there to push a narrative for a few seconds.

Going back to my problems with the animation and art direction:

• Mountain texture felt flat.
• The render felt rushed.
• The water in certain scenes felt looped and unfinished.
• Wave foam looked like it was fuzz.
• Transitions felt unplanned and thrown in.
• Quips in dialogue were clunky and unneeded.
• Comedic banter was cringe and meaningless — it did nothing to develop a character more than we already understood.
• Particle effects and atmospheric VFX were almost non-existent until the end of the film when things finally started happening.
• Facial animations weren’t even on par with what I’ve seen from indie companies.
• Bone structure was extremely minimalistic and bubble-like.
• Jawlines didn’t exist, and curvature around areas of the face was ignored completely.
• Bone rigging within the face when emotion was being portrayed did not look like it was properly reviewed.

Well, this has been your neighborhood review man, and this — well, this kinda sucked.