Raya and the Last Dragon: can fantasy represent colonial histories?

Carmeli Argana reviews the groundbreaking animation from a Southeast Asian perspective.

Growing up Filipino in an Anglo-dominated country such as Australia, there were very few people I could proudly see myself represented in. For a big chunk of my childhood, I latched onto figures such as Disney’s Mulan, Nikki Wong from 6teen and Glee’s Tina Cohen-Chang (yes, I watched Glee, what about it). These characters shaped understandings of my own racial identity - they acted as the lighthouse that illuminated my passage through the treacherous waters of being an ‘Asian’. At least they did until I realised that none of them actually reflect my lived experience as a Filipino-Australian.

Like many other Asian people across the world, I celebrated the news of Raya and the Last Dragon - Disney’s first Southeast Asian. For us, this was a much-needed opportunity to see ourselves and our cultures actually represented. It was about time white people stopped seeing us all as a monolithic culture comprised exclusively of Chinese, Japanese or South Koreans.

Despite my elation, I couldn’t quite let go of my natural scepticism from years of scrounging for scraps within an arena where there is limited space for Asian representation.

Given my background, I knew I’d have a lot to say about this film. But stepping out of the darkness of the cinema, the lingering thought at the back of my mind had less to do with how the creators went with the representation of Southeast Asian cultures and more to do with… a puzzle.

Can fantasy accurately and respectfully represent the experiences of people and cultures, especially those with a colonial history?

 Fantasy and Allegory

Prior to the film’s release, Raya had already begun to garner concerns about the fantasy approach of representing Southeast Asian cultures. By drawing upon multiple cultures as the source material for Kumandra and its tribes, doesn’t that play into the monolithic myth of Asia and its people?

The appeal of the fantasy genre has always been its ability to escape the prison of historical context and delve deep into the weirdest, most wonderful inventions of human imagination. But even the most absurd fantasy stories must remain anchored to some aspect of reality for audiences to resonate with its story. And one of the main tools through which this is achieved is allegory.

Kumandra becomes an allegory for a Southeast Asia that has been allowed to blossom on its own terms, free of colonial influence. So too, the five tribes become an allegory for the distinct nations and cultures that make up the real-world region of Southeast Asia. This creative decision merits praise for its nuanced representation of the region’s complex histories and cultures, whilst remaining respectful of the nations it draws influence from; it accommodates an appreciation of difference between cultures whilst exploring themes of betrayal without vilifying any one particular country.

The film’s villain is the Druun, “a mindless plague… born from human discord,” according to Sisu (the titular Last Dragon). Unlike previous Disney villains, the Druun is an intangible force of nature that has no motive or character beyond doing evil. In seeing the aftermath of its arrival—the near genocide of entire tribes and the dispossession of hundreds—it’s hard not to see the Druun as an allegory for colonialism.

This brings us to one aspect of this puzzle. Kumandra is a fantasy version of the Southeast Asia region that has been lifted out of its colonial context. But the same cannot be said for me, the viewer whose identity and experiences are inextricably bound to the colonial forces that conquered and shaped the country I was born in. If the point of fantasy is to bring me out of my reality, how effectively can that goal actually be realised?

 The Privilege of Trust

The clear message at the end of Raya and the Last Dragon is that distrust breeds divisiveness, and that it is only through good faith that we can break the cycle of intergenerational conflict and betrayal. It’s a strikingly pertinent message, especially in a hyper-polarised, post-Trump era that has learned to reject different perspectives and grown disillusioned with democratic institutions.

But to Southeast Asian audiences who have had to contend with leaders and institutions overrun with corruption, nepotism and in some cases, outright fascism, such a message loses its thrust and can come across as irrelevant, if not downright patronising. To be able to trust government leaders and institutions is simply a privilege that not all of us have. It’s certainly not the case for Cambodian audiences in an authoritarian regime with sanctions for dissenting voices, or Filipino viewers under a president who placed several islands under martial law in 2017, or Myanmar audiences in the midst of a political crisis after a coup d’état earlier this year.

Fantasy often centres on universal, indisputable moral themes as another anchor to reality. And the core theme in the film more or less matches that description. In an ideal world, everyone would be able to place their trust in their leaders and communities to come together. But that’s the issue. That world doesn’t exist. That world is a fantasy.

This leads us to another question: Where do the universalising themes within fantasy genres fit in, in representations of people and cultures with a specific historical (and colonial) context?

One particularly striking image in the film occurs during its opening sequence. In the bright colours and paper-like 2D design of Indonesian Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry, the monolithic land of Kumandra fractures into five nations.

This image is an apt metaphor for the task ahead for storytellers and media-makers in representing the experiences of nations and people with a colonial history. As a fantasy lover myself, I’m hesitant to discard the genre altogether. But to accurately and respectfully depict the experiences of cultures with a colonial history, we cannot apply universal principles that purport to represent all people. Instead, we need to examine the distinct contextual forces at play in each particular case.