Head of Story Fawn Veerasunthorn shared with us a bit about her experience working on the film. Why representation matters and being part of the creative process in shaping culturally specific mythology “The thing that I always say is that, ‘What I loved about Bruce Lee was we fell in love with him and his style, I could go out and study his martial art for real because it was a real thing.' I love Star Wars, but you can't really go out there and move things with your brain.” With this, if a kid falls in love with a specific martial arts form they see, they can go out and study it. “Muay Thai projects a lot in our knees., and so you see it in all the action sequences.”

“Because we were doing something to celebrate Southeast Asia, it was very important to me to celebrate the martial arts that actually come from that region,” Nguyen explained. He grew up watching Hong Kong films and Bruce Lee movies and says to be able to work on films with Disney was a true blessing. RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON featured fighting styles inspired by six different martial arts forms from multiple Southeast Asian countries-Pencak Silat, Muay Thai kickboxing, traditional Vietnamese wrestling, Arnis & Kali martial arts, and Krabi Krabong. And it's been beautiful to see how both the theme of trust and just the action of trusting each other as collaborators have really made this incredible experience and incredible movie.”Īs a lifelong martial artist, Nguyen said this was this thing that probably made him the most excited about working on the movie. I think it's a testament to not just the hard work he's done, but the hard work that everyone in our studio has done. “Don's been here for a long, long, long time, and he constantly says how beautiful the film is, one of the most beautiful he's seen, and he's seen it all. “I think everyone kind of stepped up the challenge in some amazing, beautiful ways,” Nguyen said. It was terrifying to change up how they had been doing things for years to make this one film, but what they discovered-much like the theme of the movie-is that they kind of trust in each even other more and trust that their colleagues to do work without someone working at their side. “The special ingredient has always been the way we collaborate with each other, live in person, in a room,” Nguyen said.

One of the superpowers that Disney has is it's carried these amazing artists for years and years. Writer Qui Nguyen said when it first started, it was kind of a scary notion that they were going to make a movie remotely.

Raya and the last dragon movie length