Raya and the Last Dragon it’s much more than just the last Disney movie, at least for me. I recognize that I’m not even a big Disney fan. But somehow because of Raya, there ‘s a little girl in me who finally feels seen.
Growing up in America, I almost never saw Asians in the movies or on television. And if I did, they were rarely brown and from Southeast Asia like me. Finally, this is changing.
Raya is voiced by Kelly Marie Tran, who is Vietnamese-American. The film is inspired by different cultures in Southeast Asia. The script was written by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim, which date back to Southeast Asia. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many interesting cultural Easter Eggs to find in the film. Raya’s name means “celebration” in Malay. She moves around riding her animal companion called “Tuk Tuk”, which shares her name with Cambodia’s iconic motorcycle-powered carriages (you’ll find similar wheel sets across much of Southeast Asia).
In a provocation that almost made me cry (and I’m not a crybaby), Raya wields what appear to be Arnis bamboo sticks – weapons used in the Philippine martial arts. His sword is reminiscent of the Indonesian Kris. The film’s epic combat scenes are also inspired by the fighting styles of Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
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If much of this is unfamiliar to you, I don’t blame you. I was born in the Philippines and didn’t even learn about Arnis until I entered college in the United States. When you don’t see yourself reflected in the world around you, you lose a lot. That’s why it means so much to see Raya, dark and tough, wielding the same weapons that my ancestors used to fight.
As a whole, Asian Americans are already underrepresented in the media – but Southeast Asians tend to be even more overlooked. “Asian-American” is a huge umbrella that covers many peoples, cultures and languages. Grouping everyone in a group can obscure this diversity. Worse still, it can make some communities and the inequalities they face invisible.
This is a problem often referred to as a lack of “disaggregated data” for the Asian American and Pacific Island umbrella group. There is often not enough data collected to analyze how experiences vary from group to group. For example, many Southeast Asians came to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War or the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia – and this could make their migration histories and the resources they have access to in America very different from others who have access to them. immigrated.
Poverty among Hmong Americans, many of whom came to the United States as refugees after cooperating with the United States during their “Secret War” in Laos, is twice as high – 26% – as among the Asian American community as a whole. . This kind of data is necessary to dispel the minority myth of the Asian model, a stereotype that harms all Asian Americans because it mistakenly assumes that our communities already have access to all the resources we need.
If you saw Raya or even just your trailers, so you know the movie is about bringing communities together. Disaggregating data does not mean dividing anyone. To bring people together, you need to first Watch each other.
At the Raya and the Last Dragon, we see his characters facing adversities that fit modern Southeast Asian history: there is war, loss, hunger and a long search for a cure. The main characters form a kind of mixed family of refugees who are building a new world together after each of them has lost almost everything.
I am not saying that the film and its representations are perfect. After all, it is a Disney version of real life. The film still mixes all the different cultures of Southeast Asia in a single fantasy world, and Disney has been criticized in the past for creating a monolithic culture in films like Moana and Mulan that again “aggregate” aspects of different peoples. Raya it will likely face a lot of scrutiny, in part because of the pressure to fairly represent a large group of people whose stories have largely been told in the mainstream media. I am already feeling the pressure of writing this post, knowing that there are things I will miss.
But in this case, I will consider an argument about how a story should be told instead of no story. Hopefully, it makes room for more stories to come up.