Odd Thoughts

There's something about the lone rider on a quest through a beautiful apocalyptic wasteland that just screams video game RPG to me, and also immediately grabs my attention. Raya and the Last Dragon -  Disney's latest work of art - opens with just such a scene before expositing on how its titular character got to that point. It even calls out that lone rider motif in its opening narrative commentary, deliberately drawing attention to it. And it planted a seed in my head that would be watered throughout the entire movie, Raya's narrative is written like an RPG game, in some ways that I don't think are necessarily the case in other animated films.  As in any good RPG, our lone rider quickly picks up companions and the scope of her quest radically expands. At first she only has her animal steed - an armadillo-like creature named Tuk Tuk - and a single magical shard from a broken dragon orb. But soon she discovers another creature, a water dragon named Sisu, last of her kind