Yahoo Movies Raya and the Last Dragon: why it’s time to retire ‘Asian’ as a film category
It should be cause for celebration that we have reached the stage where we can have a Hollywood movie with an all-star cast of Asian-descended actors. Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon (out now on Disney+ at a premium price) is voiced by the likes of Star Wars’s Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwafina, Gemma Chan, Daniel Dae Kim, Sandra Oh and Benedict Wong. We are in a good moment for representation in movies in general, when you factor in awards contenders such as Chinese director Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and the Korean-American tale Minari. But might it also be the time to retire “Asian” as a category? As an adjective that applies to 60% of the world’s population, from Turkmenistan to India to China, it’s not exactly fit for purpose. Was it ever?
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Raya and the Last Dragon illustrates how unhelpful a description it can be. It is set in the fictional realm of Kumandra, which is very much south-east Asian. Its artists researched cultures across the region: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. That work is reflected in the movie’s meticulous visual detail: the architecture, the landscape, the food, the weaponry, the costumes, the colours. To an outside eye, at least, it seems to have been done diligently and respectfully.
One problem: apart from Tran (whose parents are from Vietnam), most of Raya’s voice cast are of Chinese or Korean descent – so east Asian, rather than south-east Asian. The move has inevitably drawn criticism online. One open letter to Disney from a California university dismissed Raya as “not real representation”.
In its defence, many of Raya’s team are south-east Asian, including the writers Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim. But the issue is compounded by Raya’s fictionalised setting, which effectively smushes together a highly diverse region. Disney has some form in composite fictional realms: see Aladdin (set in “Agrabah”, AKA “some Arabic kinda place”), or Moana’s Polynesian isle of “Motunui”. Not to mention Black Panther’s Wakanda, although its geographic obscurity was part of the point, and faithful to the comic books.
In contrast, Disney’s European tales tend to be more specific: Brave’s Scotland or Beauty and the Beast’s France. How would we feel about a movie land that smushed together, say, England, France and Germany? Then again, Frozen, with its pan-Scandinavian setting, comes close. As does some Japanese anime: Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example, takes place in a generic “Europe”.
Maybe generically “south-east Asian” is progress compared to generically “Asian”? Some on Twitter have expressed delight at their culture being seen by Hollywood. It’s a fine line between representation and appropriation, but Disney is at least prepared to try to tread it.
