Recently, Walt Disney Animation Studios dropped some big details on their upcoming original adventure movie Raya and the Last Dragon.
Originally announced to the public during the 2019 D23 Expo, after years of reports circulating about it, Raya and the Last Dragon was to have been directed by Paul Briggs and Dean Wellins. Briggs had been with the studio since Hercules, transitioning from effects animator to story man, making big strides with the megahit Frozen and the very successful Big Hero 6. In early 2015, he announced on a blog of his that he was developing a new picture with veteran Dean Wellins, who was at one time a director on Tangled (he had stepped down from the film with Glen Keane in fall 2008), and had also just gotten off of a project that didn’t work out. It appeared that this new movie set in a fantasy realm inspired by Southeast Asian countries and was about one remaining dragon would be their feature directorial debut.
The recent report on the film confirms that Dean Wellins is no longer involved with the film, or at least with directorial or writing duties. Briggs is now a “co-director” alongside John Ripa, a supervising animator (young/baby Tarzan, Jim Hawkins) turned story artist turned director. The main directors of Raya and the Last Dragon are Don Hall and Carlos Lopez Estrada. Hall had previously directed Big Hero 6 and Winnie the Pooh, and co-directed Moana. Lopez Estrada is a live-action director, best known for his 2018 film Blindspotting. Lopez Estrada was thought to have had his own original project in the works at Walt Disney Animation Studios, along with a live-action/CGI remake of Disney’s animated feature Robin Hood. Of course, this director change could’ve happened a while back, with the new report just now letting us know. A new screenwriter, Qui Nguyen, is also attached to the picture which was being written by Adele Kim up unto this point. Most shocking of all was the recasting of the titular lead. Originally set to be voiced by Cassie Steele, Raya will be voiced by Kelly Marie Tran.
Seems like a lot has been changed…
Raya and the Last Dragon follows two sequels, Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen II. While Ralph Breaks the Internet was largely given positive critical reception, it was far more divisive amongst fans of the original Wreck-It Ralph. Frozen II has the weakest critical reception for a Disney animated feature since 2007’s Meet the Robinsons, though it was still greeted with overall positive reception. Both films, and this film, were in the works during a very rough transition for the studio. In November 2017, previous chief creative officer John Lasseter had been outed as a misogynist who regularly made several women at both WDAS and Pixar uncomfortable with his excessive unwanted advances. Instead of firing him right on the spot, Disney’s higher-ups saw it necessary to send Lasseter on a six-month sabbatical leave, I guess it was in hopes that he could return a changed man.
This left both Disney Animation and Pixar without leaders for a while. In June 2018, it was declared that Lasseter would no longer be CCO of both studios, and was given a minor consulting role til New Year’s Eve of that year. For Disney Animation, his replacement was Jennifer Lee, the writer and director of Frozen (then the highest grossing animated feature film of all time). Ralph Breaks the Internet credits Lee, Lasseter, and Chris Williams (who was director on Bolt, Big Hero 6, and Moana) as the film’s executive producers, implying that Williams was the one handling leadership duties between November 2017 and June 2018. Much of Ralph Breaks the Internet was in the can by the time Lasseter was sent on his sabbatical, including the sequence where Vanellope meets up with Disney princesses. Changes were made at the eleventh hour, including the removal of a scene that was the most talked about part of the film’s first trailer. That scene, which involved Ralph and Vanellope landing in an app designed for babies and accidentally overstuffing a cute bunny character with pancakes, was instead used for a mid-credit scene that was unrelated to the movie’s story. The film’s CG version of The Princess and the Frog‘s protagonist Tiana was also completely re-designed after controversy erupted over how different she looked from how she’s supposed to look.
Why Tiana was designed the way she was in the trailers to begin with (above right), I have no idea. If all the other princesses could resemble what they looked like in their respective films, why couldn’t she? Ralph Breaks the Internet, from the outside, looks like it was a troubled production, ostensibly overseen by three different leaders. I find the film to be decent enough, but I do feel that it is all over the place and an overall structural mess that contradicts the worldbuilding of the original (which, let me note, Lee was a screenwriter on), and has too many conveniences to move its overstuffed ticking time-bomb plot forward. Maybe that’s because of what was going on in the final year of production, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it had issues – to these eyes and ears – as a story long before Lasseter got reprimanded. Maybe it’s a me thing. Others really liked it, after all. We can argue about that until we are blue in the face.
By contrast, I found Frozen II to be a solid adventure movie that had better tonal balancing than its predecessor, and had some good songs and some nice set-pieces to boot. Like Frozen, a lot of the film was retooled and overhauled at the eleventh hour. To some, it shows. To me, it does not. This is where things get subjective. It’s easy to form a narrative out of actual happenings at these studios, and the perceived quality of the movies. After all, we can definitely explain why Disney Feature Animation struggled in the early 2000s with movies like Dinosaur, Home on the Range, and Chicken Little. Many of us know that too many executives were put in charge of the studio, and that there was no sense of direction whatsoever. For example: Back then, it seemed that the flight plan constantly changed when it came to the perceived audiences of these animated features. One minute the audience was preteens (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet), the next minute it was toddlers (Home on the Range), then after that it was seemingly Shrek fans (Chicken Little), and then who knows what.
Here, it’s not as clear-cut.
Frozen II‘s credits reveal that Byron Howard was an executive producer. Howard, the director of Bolt, Tangled, and Zootopia, was at one point considered to be the CCO of Disney Animation. This implies that he was running the studio while Lee was busy focusing on her frosty sequel. If true, then Raya and the Last Dragon is the first animated feature she’s overseeing as a CCO throughout animation production, as its first frames were presumably rendered at the start of this year. If so, this isn’t dissimilar to her predecessor, and how he often shuffled directors off of movies or added other directors to them. Perhaps Lee and the leadership at Disney Animation saw a messy film with remnants from the Lasseter era style of leadership and storytelling taking shape, and felt the need to make changes? Well, I know as much as you probably do. I’m not a fly on the wall at any Disney operation, so only the finished film and stories of the production might tell us why there’s a night-and-day difference here.
I just simply feel bad for Dean Wellins more than anything, who has lost the opportunity to direct three different long-form pictures at Disney Animation. I await what Briggs, Estrada Lopez, Ripa, and Hall bring to the table with this new feature. The first image is nice to look at, and while it has that same photoreal sheen to it that’s been common in WDAS’ features for a while, I’m sure it will still be a visually good-looking film with some cool storytelling to boot. Remember, this is still a feature from the Lasseter era that just happens to be in the final rounds of production without him. The same goes for the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical that Byron Howard is directing, which looks to be the studio’s autumn 2021 release. Something pitched after Lasseter’s exit, in a way, will be a good indicator of what things will be like going forward. Heck, many of the features from the Lasseter era were films that were in early development when Michael Eisner was still CEO of The Walt Disney Company. (i.e. Wreck-It Ralph evolved out of a movie pitched in 2004, Tangled‘s history stretches back to the early aughts or even further back, etc.)
Whether this is all for the good of the movie or not is really all subjective at this point. Some people feel that Lasseter’s imposed changes on pictures like Zootopia and Wreck-It Ralph and such were beneficial. Few preferred that earlier version of Zootopia where Nick Wilde is the protagonist and all the predatory animals are forced to wear shock collars. Little is known of the movie Wreck-It Ralph used to be, but I’ve seen very few people assume that it was infinitely superior to what we ended up getting. On the other side of the coin, you have plenty of observers who definitely wished American Dog would’ve happened instead of Bolt. I like Bolt a great deal, but I’d be lying if I said the drastic changes made to Chris Sanders’ potentially wild and weirdo road movie were needed. What was Glen Keane and Dean Wellins’ Rapunzel movie like? Generally, if I like the finished product, I don’t lament too much over the loss of what could’ve been. I do certainly feel bad for the filmmakers, though, who put their all into these ideas and concepts only to have them handed off to another team. In some cases, particularly of the Lasseter era, I do kind of wonder…
Of course, I think the same of earlier periods of Disney Animation. You bet your rump I’d love to see the planned epic two-hour Atlantis: The Lost Empire that was aiming to be this big creature feature extravaganza. As much as I love The Emperor’s New Groove, I really would love to visit an alternate timeline where Kingdom of the Sun happened instead. I’d be all about seeing Sweatin’ Bullets, I’d be gung ho about that earlier version of The Lion King from 1990 or so that was planned as a quiet atmospheric National Geographic-style animated saga, and even Richard Purdum’s planned Jean Cocteau-inspired Beauty and the Beast… And so much more.
Back to directing, though… This makes me think of something.
In the modern day, the old way of putting together an animated feature is seemingly but dead. When you look at the earliest Disney animated features, you’ll notice that they have multiple sequence directors working under one “supervising” director. The two Fleischer animated features Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town have a “director” in Dave Fleischer, and then multiple “animation directors”. By the mid 1950s, the amount of directors on a Disney animated film whittled down to about three. Then, in 1963, The Sword in the Stone became the studio’s first animated film to be directed by one person: Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman. Reitherman directed the next three features by himself. Outside of the Disney enterprise, Ralph Bakshi directed his features by himself and garnered something of an auteur status throughout the 1970s, perhaps an American animation first? Other 1970s animated productions such as Shinbone Alley and Down and Dirty Duck appear to have been directed by a single person. Sometimes things are a little muddy. For example, the American-Hungarian film Hugo the Hippo is directed by Bill Feigenbaum, with animation direction by József Gémes. Then, how was that film directed then? What did the credits mean by “animation director”? Watership Down‘s directorial work is credited solely to Martin Rosen, but it’s well-known amongst enthusiasts that John Hubley had at least directed the prologue and possibly a few other small portions of the film before his firing, despite insistence that none of his work made it into the released film.
On the subject of Raya and the Last Dragon, it seems that the untold Disney tradition is to have more than one director handling the reigns. Is it because of the inherent collaborative nature of animation? Or is it because of some deep-down desire to do it the way it has always been done? Think of some of Disney’s most renowned animated films made in the post-Walt era… How many of them were handled by a single director? Very few of them. Ron Clements and John Musker always teamed up for their films, almost like a Disney Coen Brothers or Wachowskis, but without being blood relatives. Similarly, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale directed all of their films together. The Renaissance era has a curious mix of people directing, some of which wouldn’t tackle a feature again, or at least at Disney. Roger Allers, after the runaway success of The Lion King, got shunted off of his next epic (Kingdom of the Sun) and spent years at the company doing the occasional contribution, a short, and sometimes even worked on the direct-to-video sequels. The other director, Rob Minkoff, hasn’t directed any other Disney animated feature.
Despite the growing amount of hands-on executives running Walt Disney Feature Animation in the late 1990s, multiple different directors were still brought onto projects and even brought something of a stamp to them. Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft made their exciting mark with Mulan. Kevin Lima graduated from A Goofy Movie at Disney MovieToons and knocked it out of the park with the action-packed adventure that was Tarzan, alongside first-timer and long-time Disney animator Chris Buck. Mark Dindal’s Disney animated feature debut The Emperor’s New Groove is a zany, comic blast not dissimilar to his overlooked Turner animated film Cats Don’t Dance. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois made their legendary, off-the-wall directorial debut with Lilo & Stitch. Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker brought the big and more traditional-looking Brother Bear to the screen. Will Finn and John Sanford attempted to give us a silly extended ’50s frontier cartoon with Home On The Range. No matter how compromised these films may have on a writing or tonal level, these directors seemed to enjoy enough rein with the respective presentations.
Under John Lasseter’s micromanaging style of leadership, the pendulum swung in almost the exact opposite direction. While the writing quality and tone handling was agreed by some to have improved over the early ’00s crop of features with the films quitting being overly kid-centric, we begin to see a competent house style come into play by the mid-2010s. I think Bolt and Tangled sort of laid down the foundation of the Disney CG look, with Frozen *ahem* solidifying it. Some variety does get out in some of the character design and set construction, but the sheer visual variety of the wide belly of hand-drawn films and even the first few CG films put out by this studio (Meet The Robinsons, for example, in no way resembles what came afterwards) seems to have been sacrificed. Save for the shorts, of course. Upping the writing game didn’t need to mean “make everything samey”. It’s almost not too dissimilar to how Wolfgang Reitherman just sort of stuck to his way of doing things in the late ’60s and early ’70s. As a result, there is arguably little to distinguish between the work of the individual directors who handled the movies that came out over the past ten or so years.
I see most of the directorial stamps in the storytelling aspects. Byron Howard certainly didn’t helm Frozen and Big Hero 6, and Don Hall certainly didn’t direct Tangled and Zootopia. The only anomaly in Lasseter’s line-up of Disney animated movies is Wreck-It Ralph, which was directed by Rich Moore, and Rich Moore alone. Moore had never previously worked for Disney Animation, his background was in The Simpsons, Futurama, and Drawn Together. Very not-Disney things. (Not even the fact that Disney owns The Simpsons can make The Simpsons a “Disney-like” thing.) Bringing him in wasn’t dissimilar to Pixar bringing in Brad Bird to direct a feature. As such, Moore delivered a movie that had some of that Disney feel and some of those plot points that Lasseter just could *not* deviate from, but also a film that really felt like its own unique beast. Moore then brought some of that strength and no-nonsense directing (that he likely learned from years and years of having to get 20min episodes out) onto Zootopia, adding to what Byron Howard was already succeeding with.
Co-directors is a strange thing with Disney Animation, and especially with Pixar. Sometimes “co-director” means “the other director” on the movie. This would seem to be the case with ’80s and ’90s Disney animated films handled by more than one person. However, in the Lasseter age of both Disney Animation and Pixar, it seems to mean the “lower-deck” director. I’ve also heard that it means “the person who fills in and answers questions for the director when the director is too busy”. Little of this makes any sense to me, though. Live-action rarely ever has co-directors, and there are several animated movies made outside of big studios that get by just fine with only one director. Is it back-up? Overstuffing? Or just the sheer work it takes to make a computer animated movie? Let’s look at Moana for a second. Moana was directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who had no problem handling their previous five features (two of which were pivotal hits for the studio and the company as a whole) by themselves. Never did they need a co-director or someone else to get their film to the finish line. With Moana, they had two co-directors onboard: Don Hall and Chris Williams. Moana also happens to be the duo’s first and only all-CG picture. Treasure Planet used quite a lot of CGI some fourteen years earlier, but this was entirely CGI, and the majority of the film is done in that hyperreal style that Disney just can’t let go of. What happened here? Much of the film feels like a Ron and John effort, but a lot of it also feels like a typical Disney animated film. Some of it is executed only competently, while other parts awe the senses. (The ‘You’re Welcome’ and ‘Shiny’ sequences are highlights.)
Other animation studios? Well, it varies. Sometimes DreamWorks makes movies with a few directors or a movie with a co-director (their definition is likely very different from WDAS/Pixar’s definition), sometimes one person handles all. Sony Pictures Animation isn’t dissimilar, Genndy Tartakovsky handled all three Hotel Transylvania films (he presumably won’t direct the fourth one due to him having two original features lined up at the studio), Tony Leondis directed The Emoji Movie all by himself, and such. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse began with one director, then added another, and then another, and it seems like each director handled a certain kind of sequence: Intimate scenes, action scenes, and comedic scenes. Whichever way it’s all made, what matters is if it got to the finish line unscathed. Spider-Verse had three directors and was a game-changing high point, Emoji Movie was mostly dunked on by critics and chunks of the animation fan community… So it isn’t always about how many directors are attached to an animated picture.
So going forward with Raya and the Last Dragon, shockingly Disney Animation’s first original movie since Moana debuted in fall 2016, I can only speculate as to why things have changed. My guess is that Jennifer Lee and other higher-ups were not satisfied with what the previous iteration of the film was shaping up to be, but kept Briggs on as a co-director, perhaps to help guide the new version since he and Wellins set up the foundation to begin with. Sometimes, a director change can be necessary and for the good of the picture. I think our problem is, we are so fried after years of Lasseter’s constant director removals at both Disney Animation and Pixar… and the overall sort-of samey-ness to last decade’s batch of films. We assume it’s just control-control-control, everything’s gotta fit a mold, can’t let those directors go too far with their visions. (The exact opposite might be happening at Pixar, if Soul‘s previews and what we know about Luca are anything to go by.) Maybe there was a new vision that really excited the brass? After all, these kinds of changes did occur in the past, too. The Lion King went through a few different iterations, lost its first director, and was even delayed because of story overhauls. Subsequent features like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules and such didn’t lose their directors, and didn’t seem to change so radically over pre-production, yet they were not generally regarded as highly as The Lion King was. Of course, that is all entirely subjective, too.
I just think that there isn’t one particular way to make sure an animated movie turns out good, or even financially successful. While Disney Animation saw CG hit after CG throughout this past decade, Lasseter’s model sure as hell didn’t turn Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur into a box office hit, nor did it help the Emeryville studio’s Cars 3. Onward was largely directed and produced without his involvement, the film had the lowest attendance for a Pixar opening and then a pandemic ended its theatrical life one week in. I have no idea how Onward would’ve performed had COVID-19 never happened, maybe it would’ve had strong legs and more than quadrupled its $38m opening weekend gross, maybe not. Critical reception sometimes doesn’t mean anything, because you’ll always have a detractor. There are plenty of people who dislike the 80-something-rated-on-Rotten-Tomatoes, $1.2 billion-grossing Frozen and many were unimpressed with Frozen II and a couple of other recent Disney animated hits.
Raya and the Last Dragon could come out with a near-100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and enthusiastic glowing reviews, and you’ll still have many fans and even fellow animation filmmakers who might say “it was crap!” Sometimes people use the troubled production histories as their reasoning behind their dissatisfaction with the piece, but it seems to be the go-to narrative whenever it suits the person’s tastes. I even fall prey to this, I’ve often chalked messy movies up to the troubled production. I always felt that the eleventh hour changes made to Frozen were what hurt that film, but Frozen II had several eleventh hours changes made to it as well, and I quite liked the sequel and considered it to be superior to the first one. I think, more than anything, your (and my) feelings are “you don’t like the decisions they made in that span of time.”
Remember, a masterful film like Toy Story 2 was literally being retooled top to bottom within nine or so months to go. Pinocchio, one of the pinnacles of the animated feature, was shut down in mid 1938 and restarted completely, barely a year before its general release while Fantasia and Bambi were well into production with many other features lined up.
Filmmakers… Well… It’s hard to say. Me personally? Don Hall’s work has been satisfactory to me, I really like his Winnie the Pooh film, and I quite like the storytelling of Big Hero 6 and feel it has some standout action sequences, and I’m sure what I like in Moana might be his doing too. I have never seen Carlos Lopez Estrada’s Blindspotting, but I’ve heard good things about it. Then again, even if I like the work of the talent involved, they can still turn out a disappointment or something that’s lacking to these eyes and ears. It is simply human nature. It is also human nature to dislike a work of art, while someone else eats it up. These days, it’s not so binary, I think.
My only hope is that we get a pretty good movie out of all this, and one that a lot of other folks like as well. I guess that’s the best we can wish for, eh? The last thing I would want is something mediocre and without much to offer. Even then!!! Something I would find spectacular could be seen as bland vanilla pudding waste by someone else.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you at this point… I anticipate Raya and the Last Dragon. My expectations are simple: Something good, something that leaves me with something to take with me after my viewing of it is over, a little something special…
I find most of my favorite movies have very troubled productions, Lord of the Rings, The Land Before Time, an American Tail, All Dogs go to Heaven, Wreck it Ralph, Toy Story. I think it helps inspire the film makers to make their characters overcome great adversity.
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