

Raya and the Last Dragon has a Metacritic score of 75, meaning "generally favorable reviews." (Metacritic is a sister site of CNET.) Instant classic It's a dialogue-free musical short that tells the story of an elderly man named Art and his young-at-heart wife, Dot, who rekindle their zest for life through dance. There's also a short, Us Again, that's scheduled to be released with Raya and the Last Dragon in theaters but apparently won't come to Disney Plus until June 4. If you don't want to fork over the extra $30 but do have Disney Plus, you need to wait until June 4, when the movie will be part of the regular Disney Plus subscription plan. You can then watch the film as many times as you like. If you pay up, you can watch the movie on and in the Disney Plus app on select platforms, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Roku. Disney Plus subscribers must pay an additional $30 for Premier Access to watch the film. Though the movie will be released in some theaters, it's also streaming on Disney Plus - but even subscribers have to pay an extra price for the first month of availability.ĭisney Plus is now streaming Raya and the Last Dragon. But like the land of Kumandra, our world has changed. In the days before the coronavirus pandemic, families probably would've flocked to movie theaters to see this film. Throw in a fluid foot-chase through Talon and a booby-trapped gauntlet-run in Tail (complete with explosive-farting beetles), and Raya is a rare family film with genuine action-blockbuster chops.See Disney Plus subscription options How and when to watch Veteran Disney director Don Hall ( Big Hero 6) and Blindspotting’s Carlos López Estrada deliver impressively impactful fight sequences that hit harder than typical Disney fare - using crash-zooms and speed-ramping to accentuate the fighting techniques of Raya and her nemesis Namaari ( Gemma Chan) while invoking the cinematic language of Asian action cinema.

The complex mythology does make Kumandra feel properly epic, and every stop on Raya’s journey - the desert wasteland of Tail, the lantern-lit market-town of Talon, the dense, foggy forest of Spine - has a distinct, gorgeously realised identity. But the screenplay - from Crazy Rich Asians co-screenwriter Adele Lim and Vietnamese-American writer Qui Nguyen - is pacy and propulsive, punctuating the necessary narrative groundwork with bursts of action and excitement.


It’s a lot of lore, and the opening act of Raya has plenty to unfurl – there’s a prologue to a prelude, exposition to dispense about dragon magic and the five factions of Kumandra (Tail, Talon, Spine, Fang, and Raya’s homeland of Heart), and a MacGuffin-driven mission to establish, along with the introduction of Awkwafina’s anxious water dragon Sisu. A rare family film with genuine action-blockbuster chops.
