Apologies for the doubleposting but this came into my mind as I was rewatching the trailer. As they cut to the different tribes, I couldn't help but think of how
boring they all look.
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See, as someone who loves costuming and traditional fashion, I must admit that Southeast Asia is probably one of my favorite regions when it comes to traditional dress. They use tons of bright colors and wild patterns and there is gold and jewels literally everywhere. It's like their ancestors were afraid of blank space, and I fucking love it. It's gorgeous.
Look! Beautiful! Pleasing to the eye! And definitely
not whatever boring shit the people in Raya are wearing is. I get that these are on the more formal end of clothing, but the scene that that picture above is from looks to be like an official meeting between the representatives of the different tribes, which seems like it would be the perfect occasion to wear fancy shit. They don't even have to make the clothes as hyper detailed and crazy as the real deal, but just adding some color and patterns and gold would make all the difference.
Also, please get rid of the side shaved danger hair on the leader of the White Tribe (I think her dad called them Fang Tribe?) and her kid. It just looks
bad.
and
They say they want representation but then they settle for the most boring, bland, surface level shit. The bar is so low in terms of putting even a modicum of effort into depicting their cultures and still Disney doesn't manage to clear it. The cultures of Southeast Asia are so rich, beautiful, and interesting, and they deserve to not be represented so half-assedly.
Assuming that Disney isn't entirely braindead when it comes to Asian politics, this might be intentional.
In terms of clothes for the tribes, the easiest thing to do, would have been to simply make one tribe wear Chinese clothes, one wears Japanese clothes, one wears Korean clothes and so on... but I think that's actually what they wanted to avoid here. Maybe they are aware enough of Asian conflicts that they didn't want to use RL clothes, fearing it might lead to backlashs from said nations. And using one specific style might alienate all others. So they come up with this bland as fuck color-coded-for-your-convenience bullshit, by making it bland, they want people from every Asian nation to be able to identify with these tribes without pesky political shenanigans getting in the way.
I am still expecting the evil thing to turn out to be a stand-in for colonialism/European invaders.
I've also had another idea, I originally thought this movie would be a metaphor for a chinese unification under communism or something like that, but I might have been wrong. Within chinese official party line, china is already unified (which is why Taiwan is such a big deal), so this movie could -at best- be used to highlight a pre-communism era of conflict within china, but that isn't necessarily the case when you think on a bigger scale:
What if this movie isn't a metaphor for china and how it must unite under the CCP, what if it's actually a metaphor for Asia as a whole and how it needs to unite under china's guidance?
That main character chick's tribe would be the stand-in for china, whereas all the other tribes are stand-ins for other cultures and it is thanks to china that they get unified in their common cause to fight evil white people (or whatever) under the wise guidance of the Middle Kingdom. And wouldn't you know, the kingdom the MC is coming from is the "Heart Kingdom", situated in the middle of the map...
The pink and yellow-clothed tribes already sit roughly around where Japan and Korea sit in regards to china, the white tribe might be Myanmar and the chubby greenish tribe are... dunno... from Mongolia or something.
Just spitballing, after all, this is the company that though hiring a chubby vietnamese chick that makes out with an ugly black dude would appeal to the chinese market, so all bets are off.
Be that as it may: The trailers are meh. Not horrible, but meh through and through.
