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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-03-09
So I had the pleasure of watching Disney's latest animated film. I have to say that I liked, it but it wasn't like the most amazing thing or anything. The artwork and settings are beautiful, there's a few funny jokes in it, and the characters are not bad. Of course, I can't help but criticize it.
While the animation is stunning and even includes multiple styles like the bits with the lovely cel shading and some 2D artwork in the credits, I feel like the story writing is kind of low-effort. I mean, there isn't really much to say about it, and for some reason it included mild bathroom humor. (That's not a deal-breaker, but it might have been better without it.)
There seems to be a number of clichés thrown into the blender, like there's some teen warfare drama, some Kung-Fu Panda kind of thing going on, Asian father figure story, and generally this whole "We want to do Avatar: The Last Airbender" thing. For example, the heroine has a mount that's some kind of over-sized combination animal, like a mix between a pill bug and a... well, I don't know, a sky bison? However, it doesn't fly, it rolls.
There's also the dark evil corruption blobs / forces being warded off by light crystals, which is some motif I've seen in a lot of places (although I can't remember which except for Children of Morta, the game I was playing recently), but I don't know where it comes from exactly. The dark corruption reminds me of Zoroastrian ideas, and there might be some Vedic background for it, which would be cool. The evil creatures are called "druun", and I have no idea where that word comes from, but it's not too unlike Avestan, which is not too unlike Sanskrit. It could also be made up, so maybe "sounds like" is good enough.
One of the things that sort of struck me about the film is that it seems very "Asian American", which is something that I didn't start to formulate until I began to read about it after watching it. First of all, I wanted to know where the show was set in (I assumed something like Thailand) and particularly what all the "Asian" words that the characters use mean. You see, the dialogue actually makes quite a pointed effort to introduce some vocabulary, for example "binturi" meaning something negative along the lines of "scoundrel" (I guess) and "dep la" meaning something like "friend". Since the film came out lots of people have been asking about these words online apparently.
I, too, searched for answers, but what I got was rather surprising. Even though it was noted that these words caught vewiers' attention, I haven't seen any concrete example of them being words in any language, except "dep la" *sounds like* something in Vietnamese. At least from a few Google searches, no answer on "binturi" has emerged yet. As I read, I came across the point that the creators of the film didn't want it to be set in any place in particular, but rather just "Southeast Asia", and they modeled the setting on a conglomeration of five or so countries including Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
So I'm actually a little bit puzzled by the fact (and maybe the conlanger in me feels some admiration toward it) that they may have made up some auxiliary pan-Southeast-Asian inter-language vocabulary and intentionally taught it to the audience. A part of me won't believe this and is just waiting for a post online to emerge which says exactly where the words come from, but then of course they wouldn't all come from the same language, so it's still a random mix.
The fact that they combined all these countries into a single fantasy world at first seemed very cool. I still think it can work if expanded upon, which may not have been possible within the confines of a two-hour film, but it was a formula that worked for Avatar in a lengthy serial format where they could explore that kind of composite fantasy world. I even think the movie deserves a sequal to revisit the setting, but I am also afraid that their world-building was too superficial, and it would not be fruitful.
Then I thought, well, who does this vaguely Southeast Asian setting work for? Who connects with the film and feels it represents them? How could they do that if it features all this made-up vocabulary? No one is going to watch the film and be like, "Hey, that's my language!" (It also just dawned on me that "Kumandra" rhymes with "Wakanda", but obviously the viewer knows these are fictional, so it's no big deal.)
Well, all the characters speak English anyway, and it's an American production, so I guess it's meant to inspire Asian American kids with Southeast Asian roots. (I guess, for everyone for whom Mulan doesn't work? Brown-skinned Asians? Non-East-Asian Asians who aren't Indians?) The thing that's kind of weird about that and probably speaks to our horrible Eurocentrism, is that you wouldn't expect someone to make a film about "Europeans" and portray Europe as a single country. (Or would you?) At least Mulan gets to be in China specifically, but can all of Southeast Asia be compacted into one Kumandra? Is all of Africa just Wakanda? Is the entire Middle East (maybe including part of South Asia!?) Aladdin's Agrabah?
It seems that my feeling was not unique, and that this has been a widespread criticism of the movie. Time covered it quite well in an article I came across today and motivated me to go ahead and write this post. Here is the article on the WWW:
https://time.com/5944583/raya-and-the-last-dragon-southeast-asia/
Anyway, like I said, it was nice and I enjoyed it. I, like many people, was excited for the setting, but I kind of expected more. Surely, it could have been done better. The artwork and visuals are just top-notch, but otherwise there's something a bit vague and bland about it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like somebody needs to come and do this better, and probably make it specific to one country like just pick Thailand or Indonesia or Vietnam.
What are your thoughts? I thought about doing a gemcast about it, but I've been too lazy to do those lately and figured writing about it would be faster. However, I'll need to make a gemcast soon since it's long overdue.
Another thing I'd like to hear from readers is this: What do you call the bug that I call a "pill bug"? It seems these cute little critters have a different name everywhere. (When I was a kid, we called them "roly polies". According to Wikipedia they aren't even native to Asia; I've seen them in Iran but never in Tajikistan.) Google says that the creature in the movie is actually a combination of an armadillo and a pug. (Armadillos aren't Asian either?)