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When that was put together, I think we all were like, "Yep." You could see the entertainment potential just in storyboards. Like Tong, once we latched on to his specific speech patterns, every time we got to that point in the script or the screening, it was like, "Aw, I love this," you know?Īdele Lim: Little Boun at the Shrimporium, I remember when we were talking about his character, there was a concern of, "He's young, would he be running a restaurant by himself?" And you know, in Southeast Asia, a lot of times in these food hawker stalls, the person coming up to you and hassling you about having exact change is the six-year-old kid who's doing the math in her head and who's got it down and is haranguing you for a tip.ĭon Hall: And then the Noi chase, as crazy and weird as it is that there's this little baby who's the boss of a little gang of con artists - I know it sounds weird - but it made sense in our head.
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Like, "Well, hopefully this will work!" But I think when we started to read the pages, we started to have more and more confidence. The filmmakers initially wondered whether all of these heightened characters would fit into one story together.ĭon Hall: Part of it is a wing and a prayer. Raya's ragtag band of allies included Tong the warrior giant ( Benedict Wong), Boun the 10-year-old owner of the Shrimporium (Izaac Wang) and Little Noi the con-baby (Thalia Tran), with her loyal hench ongis. You have to try again and again, even though it doesn't work, even though people might betray you, even though you might lose things, you still have to have hope and you still have to keep reaching out because that's the only way we're going to make it through this mess together. I think that we heard Biden's inauguration speech, and we're joking with Qui like, "Did you write that on the side?" So many of the ideas that he was communicating are really part of the DNA of the movie.Īdele Lim: The big message that I think we're also proud of is the act of pulling people together, it's not one magical act that is suddenly going to fix everything. I think it is kismet that our movie's coming out right now.
#Raya and the last dragon baby noi movie
We'd love to release it yesterday, because it's important to have it now.Ĭarlos López Estrada: I think we definitely understood the weight that this movie could have, and the fact that we were going to contribute to the conversation of what it takes for people with completely different worldviews to come together. We were telling a story about divisiveness and how you come together, and the more things developed with the pandemic, the more this movie became timely and timelier. Osnat Shurer: We didn't think of ourselves as prescient. Of course, all that was pre-pandemic, and then when the pandemic hit and we had to work at home, it felt eerily like life imitating art, actually.Ĭarlos López Estrada: Don and I were watching one of the last cuts of the movie, and we walked out of the theater and I told him, "People are going to think that we wrote this this weekend or last week."
![raya and the last dragon baby noi raya and the last dragon baby noi](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/9c/e8/f29ce82a94478155d144ab9c4a740a70.png)
They are sort of a mindless, primal force of nature that are attracted to human discord and fragmentation, and they decimate the world of the film. But it was important for us to put this world under an existential threat. Sound familiar? Team Raya could never have predicted how timely the real-world parallels of the film would be.Īdele Lim: When we were creating the bones of the story years ago, before the pandemic, we could see that people were becoming more divided, more fractured, and a lot of us are parents and that is not the world we want our kids to grow up in.ĭon Hall: We wanted to tell the story of a broken world trying to achieve unity, and that's why there's really no big bad in the movie, in terms of an uber villain who is scheming or plotting to do this or that. A hopeful leader setting out to bridge the divide and bring her people together. A fractured world, its people divided based on fear and hostility.