Walt Disney Animation Studios’ new film, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” follows a lone warrior as she searches for the last living dragon in the fantastical land of Kumandra, hoping to restore peace and reunite a divided land. The film was released in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access on Friday.
James Romo, a graduate of UT’s radio-television-film program, was a production supervisor on the film. He first joined Disney in 2014 as a production assistant on the Academy Award-winning film “Big Hero 6.”
The Daily Texan spoke to him about working on “Raya and the Last Dragon” and his passion for storytelling and animation.
The Daily Texan: When did you first become interested in animation?
James Romo: I think for me, it was more about the type of stories that studios were telling. Growing up, (there were) Disney movies all over. (At) the time, I was seeing “The Princess and the Frog,” “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Frozen” and seeing what kind of stories were being told there. Then learning … how collaborative everything was, and knowing that (animation is) not built like live action, where we get a script and we just go off and make the movie. At Disney, (the) writer is in the story room with the artists, and sometimes the artists have pitches or lines of dialogue … and the writer is right there with them saying, “Oh, you know what? That works so much better because of this or that.” So because it was such a different pipeline and a different process, it really drew me toward the world of (animation).
DT: What drew you to “Raya and the Last Dragon” specifically?
JR: After “Big Hero (6)” … I was in the “Moana” story room for two years. I was all about story, so I was drawn to Moana and Raya just because of who they (are) as characters — being warrior types and … strong leaders for their communities and their people. In particular with Raya, it was like, “Cool, this is our chance to create a fantasy inspired by real regions of the world” and also play with a new type of character — the sidekick of a dragon was a really cool idea to me. A female protagonist is always like my bread and butter.
DT: Having produced a good bit of the film during the COVID-19 pandemic, what was it like to watch this story come to life?
JR: It was so great. We go through so many reiterations of the script. We actually … tear apart our movies every 12-15 weeks, and we do that about nine times, so we screen the movie nine different times before it’s released and it’s fully finished. It was really cool seeing it come to life because we weren't in the studio. We were all at home … on Zoom, and I remember thinking, because I was on so early, I saw the movie in black and white sketches for three years. Once we got started working from home, I (thought) there’s no way that we’re going to be able to create shots in animation from people’s homes … but with Disney magic, it definitely worked. I remember when I first saw the fully completed film on my little laptop at home, I was just like, “Wow, we did it. This is amazing.”
