"Raya and The Last Dragon" Trailer

[sandstorm]

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In a land called Kumandra, a re-imagined Earth inhabited by an ancient civilization split into five different regions, lived Raya. Raya was a fearless, lone and passionate warrior, and also the daughter of a powerful chief. Raya lived with her animal sidekick, Tuk Tuk and when an evil force threatens her kingdom, the two decide to leave their

Comments

[lawofcosines]

it's fine but as a southeast asian, all the promo material from this shows that it's a mish-mash of maritime southeast asia... like the kris sword from the philippines, sceneries inspired by indonesia and malaysia etc... lol the small details nitpicking

[queenursula]

It's a fictional fantasy world that is inspired by South Asian cultures.

[littleorcs]

Fellow SEAsian here! I get they wanna draw elements from different countries but I just have questions tbh, like is Raya Malay? Is she Filipino? Is she Viet? How about the people? You can't really just say "they are a mix of all of them" and call it a day tbh. Not when you want to mix a rice padi hat with a kris (which at least IS cross-cultural since it's found in the Indo-Malay regions as well) and then add on Wayang Kulit masks

[lawofcosines]

Right? The kris is a very specific weapon used by Muslim Filipinos and even though there are a lot of overlap, there are huge differences between Mindanao cultures and Borneo, or even Sulawesi and Moluccas. Hell, even those islands are very different from Java and Sumatra. It's not asking for too much, we just want some clarity lol

[eatmydustbinns]

Isn't that what they did with Moana? They took inspirations from different Polynesian cultures to make a fantasy world?

[pivotandsway]

i think they are going to keep doing this for these types of movies, taking the “coolest” parts of very distinct and disparate cultures to build their made-up world, like in Moana and Black Panther. i personally don’t really care for it bc i think it is confusing and ignores why certain aesthetics/items originated where they did but i see how they may want as many people as possible to go “wow i recognize that my people do/did that & i feel represented~” and it is fantasy so there are certain liberties that people feel they can take. i know it’s not meant to be historical but this may be some kids only exposure to that kind of stuff so i still find it kind of annoying lol. and you know next halloween what they’ll try to do like with the Maui suits a few years ago. but that just means we need more stories from different cultures that broaden the view of what Africa, Polynesia, SEA etc are. at the very least the writers are women of Vietnamese and Malaysian descent/origin including the lady who wrote Crazy Rich Asians. Moana didn’t even

[sidesmile]

I think it's fair to want specificity, but given fantasy is also an incredibly Eurocentric genre, why can't we have Asian fantasies too? I see far less critique on this on Avatar the Last Airbender which you could argue is a mish-mash of Asian cultures. And ATLA was created by white people. At least Raya has Asian writers.