Vietnamese American actress Kelly Marie Tran is the new star of Disney’s animated “Raya and the Last Dragon”, an original fantasy film that is strongly influenced by Southeast Asian stories and cultures.
Disney also gave a first look at the film about a computer-generated Raya and her familiar reed Tuk Tuk, which the makers describe as “a fuzzy bear meets an insect version of an armadillo.”
Tran takes over the role from Canadian actress Cassie Steele. The film is directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, with playwrights Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim on board.
“Raya and the Last Dragon” is set in the kingdom of Kumandra, where dragons and humans lived in harmony until Druun monsters invaded the dragons and forced themselves to sacrifice themselves for mankind. The film follows Raya – part princess, part warrior – and her journey to find the last dragon to save Kumandra from evil forces.
Awkwafina will die alongside Tran as Sisu, a dragon in human form who needs Raya’s help to regain her power and become her true dragon herself.
Tran makes history as the first actress of Southeast Asian descent to lead a film by Walt Disney Animation Studios.
The makers and the studio wanted to accurately depict the Southeast Asian cultures they pick up, including countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. A Disney Animations rep said it formed a group called the Raya Southeast Asia Story Trust, similar to the Oceanic Story Trust formed for “Moana”, which included anthropologists, linguists, dancers and gamelan musicians from Indonesia covered. Production designers and other creatives also went to regions in Southeast Asia to look at the designs.
Tran is best known for her role as Rose Tico in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017) and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” (2019). Since the release of “The Last Jedi”, she has been subjected to a lot of mass trolling and a lot of racist insults on social media, and she deleted her Instagram profile in June 2018 after constant criticism in the comments about her race.
Celebrities, including their “Star Wars” co-stars Mark Hamill and John Boyega, came to their defense, along with several fans.
In August 2018, Tran wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how she began to believe the harsh remarks.
“As much as I hate to admit it, I started to blame myself. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe if I was thinner’ or ‘Maybe if I grow my hair’ and, least of all, ‘Maybe if I was not Asian. ‘For months I went down a spiral of self-hatred, in the darkest recesses of my mind, places where I tore myself apart, where I put their words above my own self-worth. And it was then that I realized I had been lied to, ‘she wrote.
Now fans are celebrating Tran’s evolution into a Disney princess on social media.
Comedian and writer Jenny Yang said in a tweet that she is “proud of my talented friend.” Director Tze Chun applaudiseare Tran as the first lead in Southeast Asian Disney.
The film stopped production when the coronavirus pandemic hit, but the cast and 400 crew members – including Hall, López Estrada, Nguyen and Lim – worked remotely this year. The film is already 50 percent animated, said Hall, the director, in an interview with EW.
“Raya and the Last Dragon” is scheduled to be released March 12.
