What Disney Gets Wrong About Representation in ‘Raya and the Last Dragon’
The smash hit animation does not put South-East Asia first after all
Some reviewers claim that Raya and the Last Dragon is your typical,‘one size fits all’ Disney offering. Calling it a hodgepodge of South East Asian influences, they bemoan the fact that it essentially homogenizes the cultures of 670 million people.
As someone of Indian origin, I can empathize-India, as a subcontinent, has 28 states and 8 union territories, with people resident speaking over a 1000 languages. That’s why, even as a kid, I’d get irritated when people asked me if I spoke ‘Indian’-how much more irritating would it be for people living in a territory as vast and diverse as South-East Asia to have a plethora of their traditions mashed up into one culturally indistinct film?
Race and sexism in Disney’s ‘princess-in-distress’ stories
There are some who would counter that Disney has come a long way with regards to representation.
Its beloved princess style stories, after all, started with the likes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a film which championed the titular character as a fervent housekeeper with no distinct personality of her own. Moving on, the media empire produced the likes of controversial hit-animations Mulan, Pocahontas and Aladdin, which were criticised by historians and indigenous tribes alike for overt inaccuracy in the blurring of story and myth.
Yet Disney’s fresh wave of films won acclaim for breaking away from the conventional romance plot as well as the dated helpless heroine format (think Tangled, Merida and Frozen). The common misconception is that these films are not culturally insensitive.
One could not be more wrong.
Take, for example, The Princess and the Frog. Charmed as we are by the ambience of 1920’s New Orleans, it’s telling that Tiana spends most of her time as an enchanted frog. Instead of engaging and confronting the world as the black princess she is, our heroine frolics around as an amphibian with her very own frog prince, squandering any opportunity for proper representation.
Moana, considered a Disney milestone with regards to representation, was criticised for depicting the demi-God Maui as an obese buffoon. (The brand of brawn and humour served up by Disney does not translate to the figure’s depiction in Polynesian folklore, which describes Maui as both intelligent and magnificent.)
Even Coco, a film thought to have properly tackled cultural representation still earned criticism for incorporating Mexican stereotypes.
‘It’s Asian’: on cultural amalgamation
Disney’s tentative approach in addressing culture and opting for homogenization in Raya and the Last Dragon may stem from a wish to not invite charges of cultural appropriation again.
Yet the attempt to save face has backfired, with reviewers citing age-old Hollywood practices of creating composite fantasy worlds, replete with architecture, art, language and fashion that seek to represent but ultimately flatten the ‘Asian’ story they set out to tell.
In an interview, Qui Nguyen, one of the screenwriters from Raya and the Last Dragon, defends the film’s choices in creating the fictional country of Kumandra without any specific ties to existing countries. She argues that setting the story within an actual South-East Asian country such as Thailand or Malaysia may have been construed as racist, considering that Raya and the Last Dragon is a story about a broken world full of deceit and treachery, an audience being likely to infer that ‘this country is bad, and this one’s good, and our hero’s from here’.
In a BBC interview on the subject, David Lim, an associate professor at Open University Malaysia, said that due to latent nationalism in the region, not being able to identify Kumandra may have helped prevent a potential conflict breaking out between countries.
It’s an interesting argument. Yet Brave is set in Scotland and Frozen in Norway-why, one could ask, is cultural specificity permissible in a European context but not an Asian one?
Still, it’s undeniable that the exhaustive research that went into rendering the kingdom of Kumandra authentic comes with its own rewards-the clothing, cuisine and civilisation of the fictional country may still serve as Easter eggs to many different people as the film features everything from Vietnamese topography to Filipino weapons.
Raya and the Last Dragon accomplishes this best through the depiction of food in the film.
Eating behaviour in South East-Asia
‘Breaking bread’ is not just an important concept within a Judaeo-Christian society but a universal tradition, particularly in the Asian context. The animation film shows how sharing a meal at the same table can help create a bond between seemingly disparate people.
That sense of community which shared food symbolises is rendered iconic by Benja, Raya’s father, who creates a tom yum for her, made with ingredients of all five warring factions in Kumandra: shrimp paste from Tail, lemongrass from Talon, bamboo shoots from Spine, chili from Fang and palm sugar from Heart. He uses the dish as a metaphor to illustrate how beautiful and rich a united country can be if its people act in synergy for the common good.
Raya’s later insistence on eating strips of rubbery jackfruit jerky she has dried herself shows how insular she has grown, unwilling to let down her guard enough to sit at the same table and enjoy a shared meal. When she encounters Boun, the 10-year-old proprietor of a boat restaurant, who serves her a bowl of congee (a thick, savoury rice porridge that is served with shrimp, spring onions and crispy fried onions), she initially refuses to eat out of fear that the food is poisoned. Yet after talking to him, she slowly begins to thaw, realising Boun is someone she can trust, thereby showcasing the healing effect of shared food.
It’s something I can testify to. From sharing fragrant, milky chai paired with golden yellow jackfruit chips to eating a full meal in form of tapioca curry and savoury fish stew when I visit family in India, I know that the time spent in this way does not just serve to still one’s hunger but helps to affirm bonds and make new ones at the same time.
Role of cultural identity in storytelling
But for the accuracy that went into details such as food culture, the story suffers. Where other, similarly flawed Disney adaptions have their heroes connect to their respective cultures, finding solutions to their problems in their own cultural identities, Raya has nothing of the sort.
One critic states that this is because the story is not modeled on a specific myth, such as in the case of Mulan, which is based on ‘The Ballad of Mulan’. As such, what it ‘gives isn’t really Pan-Asian culture, however, so much as an amalgam of pop culture: princess toons, sure, but also nods to everything from Indiana Jones to Mad Max, Game of Thrones to The Last Airbender, wuxia epics to heist flicks and buddy comedies.’
Raya’s journey to restore her country is just that-there is nothing that ties her personally to the quest. In fact, if you exchanged her for any other random person, it would make no difference as the character building, in contrast to the sumptuous world building, is comparably bland. Watching the scene where Raya takes Namaari’s hand had me mentally rewind to The Guardians of The Galaxy ‘stand-off’(see below, picture to the right), which it resembles to a remarkable degree. (The fact that the film starts off in a post-apocalyptic future where a large extent of the population does not exist is certainly reminiscent to the ‘blip’ within MCU canon, referring to the moment Thanos snapped his fingers to erase half the world population.)
It’s not as if Disney didn’t have success with a formula that celebrated a hero’s discovery of their roots.
For all the criticism thrown at Moana, it’s undeniable that it’s the story of a princess who saves the world by reaffirming her own identity (via a connection to the ocean) as well as by discovering a part of her people’s heritage (a past as wayfinders). Black Panther is a live action film that, just like Raya and the Last Dragon, expends a lot of effort in depicting the history of its fictional country’s technology, art, clothing as well as society. The difference is that its hero, T’Challa, in his quest to be a proper leader of Wakanda is actively influenced by said Wakandan world view.
In contrast, Raya as a character appears inconsequential. She skits from kingdom to kingdom, engaging and amassing a ragtag of followers, that, for all their endearing qualities, are little more than archetypes themselves. Avatar: The Last Airbender, which, as an animation offering has often been compared to Raya, actually has its protagonist Aang travel across kingdoms not just to pick up a stone but to learn about the ways and traditions of the different tribes (which directly resemble Inuit, Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese culture) that make up the the four kingdoms within his world.
Nonetheless, there are still things to admire in the production apart from its detailed world building. In an interview, writer Adele Lim talks about being inspired by kung fu films that depict strong warrior women and the importance of depicting female friendships on screen.
As mentioned previously, Disney in recent years has placed a greater focus on parent and sibling bonds than on romance, with evil not represented as a single figure (like the Grand Vizier in Aladdin) but in the form of ideas and emotions such as fear and jealousy. This change has also meant the introduction of a slew of self-possessed, courageous young heroines that question gender roles and expectations. Having strong, beautiful women take centre stage is therefore less of the ‘breakthrough’ Lim thinks it is.
She also mentions the fact that ‘all skin tones’ are represented in Raya and the Last Dragon which is definitely a win for representation, albeit a superficial one. It is certainly important that children of different racial ties can identify with characters on screen yet for the effort to bear fruit, colour (and by extension, the depiction of cultural identity) needs to actually inform the story itself.
It’s clear that Raya and the Last Dragon, as Lim states, is ‘anchored in something true’-now, the challenge lies in delivering said truth in a way that is not so nebulous as to render it negligible.
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