Rachelle Roach

As typical of Disney, the character design, animation, and scenery was pretty cool, which bumps up the rating. The story was very meh though, very surface level, 2 dimensional message of trusting each other. It could've done better by going more in depth about what shapes the message, for example, Namaari confronting how her mother was the one who kept pushing her from a young age to take on terrible tasks and she ends up bearing the brunt of the blame as a result, her mom's desire to use paranoia and control to protect her region only making the world more unsafe as a result because people have to act like her conniving mother to protect themselves. Which can culminate into a powerful message of how Namaari can't trust her mom, contrasting Raya's relationship with her dad. I think it would've added more dimension about adding the message of not just trust, but why on a personal level it's worth it to risk trusting people even though you may get hurt. That you can trust that, even if someone hurts you, you can trust that they don't want to hurt people, but are forced to due to being an orphaned baby who needs to steal to survive, or maybe a warrior who learned to be hostile to protect his family. Instead, the speech during the climax of the movie was external rather than intrinsically motivated "dragon plot macguffin wanted us to do this, so we have to".

This movie got rated worse than cats on Rotten Tomatoes, yes, it is that bad. Even Maddie, the star of the film, didn't want to act in it due to harmful stereotypes but was pressured by adults around her at the age of 15. Sad that girl has more common sense than Sia, a woman in her 40's who thought her poorly researched inspiration porn was a good idea.