The Flawed Fantasy World of <em>Raya and the Last Dragon</em>

Fantasy worlds that mirror real-life cultures have a long history in storytelling. Middle-earth, the Four Lands, Narnia, Westeros, Earthsea: These are fictional places populated by imaginary creatures and characters, but with politics, faiths, and cultural dynamics that resemble our own. They give their creators license to world-build with allegories for contemporary issues, but without worrying too much about fidelity to reality. For Disney’s animated films, such fantasy lands—Wonderland, Neverland, even Atlantis—are part of the studio's cinematic legacy. But when depicting non-Western cultures, Disney has sometimes flattened the various cultures of a region into one stereotype-heavy location. Agrabah, in the animated , was a visual mishmash of Middle Eastern cultures, and was originally described in song as “barbaric