Raya and the Last Dragon: Light, Shadow, and the Oldest Kind of Animation
Watching Disney's Raya, I found myself thinking less about dragons than about one of animation's oldest relatives: shadow theatre.
Long before drawings moved on a screen, people were making images come alive with light. Shadow puppetry developed across Asia and beyond: from Chinese piyingxi and Indian leather puppets to Turkish Karagöz and Indonesian wayang kulit. Different cultures varied the technique, but the miracle remained simple: a figure, a light, a screen—and suddenly something lifeless begins to move.
China has a wonderfully cinematic origin legend. In the second century BCE, Emperor Wu of Han was said to be grieving a beloved consort. A magician named Shaoweng supposedly recreated her presence behind a curtain with light and shadow, making her silhouette appear alive. Historians don't treat this as proof, but as a myth it feels perfect: animation imagined as a way of bringing the absent back into the room.
The puppets turn this illusion into craftsmanship. In Chinese shadow theatre they may be leather or paper; in Indonesian wayang kulit, carved leather. Their bodies are pierced with ornament, painted with translucent colour, and moved with slender rods. A hand shifts behind the screen; a warrior lifts a sword or a dragon bends its spine. Animation is already hiding inside the mechanism.
Eventually, shadow theatre entered cinema. In 1926, Lotte Reiniger created The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the earliest surviving animated feature and one of the defining works of silhouette animation. She cut figures by hand, animating them frame by frame and bringing shadow theatre to cinema.
Nearly a century later, Michel Ocelot became a great contemporary heir. Films such as Princes and Princesses and Tales of the Night return to silhouettes and luminous colour, making the form feel ancient and modern at once.
This is why the opening of Raya and the Last Dragon works so beautifully. Kumandra draws from Southeast Asian cultures, and for the prologue — the story of the dragons, the Druun and the breaking of Kumandra, the filmmakers turned toward shadow puppetry.
The stylised silhouettes and flattened landscapes signal another temporal layer. We aren't watching history; we're watching how a civilisation remembers itself.
Continuity. A puppeteer moves a leather figure behind a screen. Reiniger moves a paper silhouette beneath a camera. Ocelot turns black cut-outs into kingdoms. Disney recreates the same logic digitally. The tools change. The impulse doesn't.
Shadow theatre reminds us that animation didn't begin with computers, or even cinema. It begins whenever someone looks at an inert object and thinks: what if I could make you alive? So thank you, Disney, for letting an ancient technology of imagination survive inside a contemporary blockbuster and for turning light, darkness and human hands into an entire universe.
Long before drawings moved on a screen, people were making images come alive with light. Shadow puppetry developed across Asia and beyond: from Chinese piyingxi and Indian leather puppets to Turkish Karagöz and Indonesian wayang kulit. Different cultures varied the technique, but the miracle remained simple: a figure, a light, a screen—and suddenly something lifeless begins to move.
China has a wonderfully cinematic origin legend. In the second century BCE, Emperor Wu of Han was said to be grieving a beloved consort. A magician named Shaoweng supposedly recreated her presence behind a curtain with light and shadow, making her silhouette appear alive. Historians don't treat this as proof, but as a myth it feels perfect: animation imagined as a way of bringing the absent back into the room.
The puppets turn this illusion into craftsmanship. In Chinese shadow theatre they may be leather or paper; in Indonesian wayang kulit, carved leather. Their bodies are pierced with ornament, painted with translucent colour, and moved with slender rods. A hand shifts behind the screen; a warrior lifts a sword or a dragon bends its spine. Animation is already hiding inside the mechanism.
Eventually, shadow theatre entered cinema. In 1926, Lotte Reiniger created The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the earliest surviving animated feature and one of the defining works of silhouette animation. She cut figures by hand, animating them frame by frame and bringing shadow theatre to cinema.
Nearly a century later, Michel Ocelot became a great contemporary heir. Films such as Princes and Princesses and Tales of the Night return to silhouettes and luminous colour, making the form feel ancient and modern at once.
This is why the opening of Raya and the Last Dragon works so beautifully. Kumandra draws from Southeast Asian cultures, and for the prologue — the story of the dragons, the Druun and the breaking of Kumandra, the filmmakers turned toward shadow puppetry.
The stylised silhouettes and flattened landscapes signal another temporal layer. We aren't watching history; we're watching how a civilisation remembers itself.
Continuity. A puppeteer moves a leather figure behind a screen. Reiniger moves a paper silhouette beneath a camera. Ocelot turns black cut-outs into kingdoms. Disney recreates the same logic digitally. The tools change. The impulse doesn't.
Shadow theatre reminds us that animation didn't begin with computers, or even cinema. It begins whenever someone looks at an inert object and thinks: what if I could make you alive? So thank you, Disney, for letting an ancient technology of imagination survive inside a contemporary blockbuster and for turning light, darkness and human hands into an entire universe.
16.09.2026