The Memory Heist: How DreamWorks' 'Forgotten Island' Turns Filipino Mythology Into a Diaspora Reckoning
The Memory Heist: How DreamWorks' 'Forgotten Island' Turns Filipino Mythology Into a Diaspora Reckoning
The first major animated film rooted in Philippine folklore asks the question every immigrant carries: What do you lose when you leave? A PinoyBuilt analysis of the most important Filipino cultural moment in animation history.
There is a moment in every immigrant's life—a hinge point, usually unrecognized until decades later—when the old world begins to dissolve. Not with violence. Not with ceremony. But with the slow, quiet erosion of a grandmother's recipe you can no longer replicate from taste alone, a lullaby whose Tagalog lyrics have been replaced by English approximations, a street in Marikina that you can picture perfectly but could no longer navigate if you were set down at its mouth. I know this moment intimately. I left the Philippines at age nine, carried from #9 Carmine Street in SSS Village in Marikina, Rizal to a high-rise Warren Barr Tower on 856 W. Nelson Street in Chicago, to Hiddenbrooke Hills in Vallejo, and I have been negotiating the distances between those addresses for fifty years. The memories remain. But they require more effort to hold every year. They are, in a word, fading.
Which is why the first trailer for DreamWorks Animation's Forgotten Island—released on March 25, 2026, and already tearing across every Fil-Am group chat, tita text thread, and diaspora subreddit in existence—hit me with the force of something far larger than a children's movie. This is not simply a film about Filipino folklore. It is a film about the cost of leaving home, wrapped in the language of myth. And for the 4.6 million Filipinos living in the United States, for the 10 million OFWs scattered across six continents, for every second-generation kid who has ever been asked "Do you eat with with your hands?" and didn't know where to begin correcting the question—this is the film we didn't know we were waiting for.
H.E.R.—born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson—grew up in Vallejo, California, the same city where PinoyBuilt founder J.F.R. Perseveranda has lived since 1979. Wilson's Filipina mother hails from Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, and H.E.R. has spoken publicly about growing up in the Bay Area's tight-knit Fil-Am community, singing karaoke at family gatherings, and eating adobo at her tita's house. She is an Oscar, Grammy, and Emmy winner—and Forgotten Island marks her first voice-acting role in animation. Vallejo represents.
💬 Please comment below ↓
Nakalimutan (nah-kah-lee-MOO-tahn)
Verb (past tense): Forgotten; to have forgotten.
From the root word limot (to forget), with the prefix naka- indicating a completed state. The fictional island of Nakali in the film draws its name directly from this word—a place where memories are lost, where the things you once held close simply slip away. In the context of the diaspora, nakalimutan carries an almost spiritual weight: it is the fear that lives in the chest of every immigrant parent who watches their children grow up speaking English at the dinner table. It is the phantom that PinoyBuilt was built to fight.
The Portal Opens: What Forgotten Island Is
Let us establish the facts. Forgotten Island is an original animated feature produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Universal Pictures, scheduled for theatrical release in the United States on September 25, 2026. It is directed and written by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado—the same creative partnership behind 2022's critically acclaimed Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Mark Swift produces. It is DreamWorks' 50th animated feature film, and the first in the studio's three-decade history to be rooted entirely in Filipino culture and Philippine mythology.
The premise is deceptively simple, in the way that all great fables are simple. Set in the Philippines during the 1990s, the story follows Jo and Raissa, two lifelong best friends who are about to be separated by the great engine of Filipino migration. Raissa's family is moving to the United States. On their last night together—a night of junk food, karaoke, and the particular grief that teenagers feel but cannot yet name—the two stumble upon a portal that transports them to Nakali, a mythical island pulled from the folklore they grew up hearing. Nakali is gorgeous, terrifying, and alive with creatures drawn from the deepest wells of Philippine mythology: the manananggal, the aswang, the sarimanok, the diwata. But there is a price. The longer they stay, the more their memories of their real lives—and of each other—disappear.
Read that premise again. Then tell me it isn't the story of every Filipino family that has ever boarded a plane.
— H.E.R. (Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson), at the Forgotten Island trailer event, DreamWorks HQ, Glendale, CA
The Two Faces of the Diaspora: H.E.R. and Liza Soberano
The casting of the two leads is not accidental. It is, in fact, the most quietly radical decision in the entire production. H.E.R.—born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson in Vallejo, California, to a Filipina mother from Cabanatuan and an African-American father—voices Jo, the gregarious, artistic friend who wants to stay in the Philippines. Liza Soberano—born Lisa Frankland in Santa Clara, California, raised partly in the Philippines, and one of the most recognizable faces in Filipino entertainment—voices Raissa, the responsible friend who is about to leave for America.
Consider what DreamWorks is doing here. They have cast a Fil-Am who grew up in the Bay Area as the character who wants to stay in the Philippines, and they have cast a Filipina who became famous in Manila as the character who is about to leave. The roles are inverted. The diaspora's two halves—the one who left and the one who stayed—are voiced by women who embody the opposite experience. That is not a casting choice. That is a thesis statement.
H.E.R. has been open about the duality of her identity. She has spoken about feeling too Black for the Asian kids and too Asian for the Black kids, about growing up singing Sharon Cuneta's "Maging Sino Ka Man" at family karaoke nights in Vallejo, about not fitting in anywhere and discovering that this was, in her words, her "superpower." She dedicated her Oscar win to Black and Filipino girls. She hand-painted Baybayin script onto her Belle costume when she became the first Black-Filipina Disney Princess in Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration. For H.E.R., Forgotten Island is not a paycheck. It is an inheritance.
Soberano, for her part, described the project as a long-held dream. She spoke at the trailer event about wanting to be part of something that represented the Philippines accurately while remaining universal enough for global audiences. She understands something that Hollywood has been slow to learn: specificity is not the enemy of universality. It is the vehicle. The more precisely you tell a Filipino story, the more every audience in the world recognizes themselves in it.
The Voice of the Ancestors: Lea Salonga as the Dreaded Manananggal
And then there is Lea Salonga.
Let that sink in. Lea Salonga—the voice of Jasmine in Aladdin, the voice of Mulan in Mulan, the Tony Award-winning star of Miss Saigon and Les Misérables, the most internationally celebrated Filipino performer in the history of Western musical theater—has been cast not as a princess, not as a mentor, not as a wise grandmother. She has been cast as the Dreaded Manananggal. The villain. The monster. The self-segmenting vampiric creature that Filipino children have feared in the dark for centuries.
This is a masterstroke, and I suspect Salonga knows it. For decades, she has been the Filipino world's ambassador to Western entertainment—the proof that we belong on Broadway, in Disney, in the global canon. To now take that voice, that instrument of international respectability, and channel it through the throat of our most feared mythological creature is an act of cultural reclamation so profound it deserves its own essay. The manananggal is not a Western monster. She cannot be reduced to a vampire or a witch. She is ours. And to hear her rendered in the voice of our greatest living performer is to feel something shift in the tectonic plates of representation.
The manananggal (from the Tagalog root tanggal, meaning "to separate") is one of the most distinctive creatures in Filipino mythology. Traditionally depicted as a woman who can sever her upper torso from her lower body, sprout bat-like wings, and fly through the night to feed on sleeping pregnant women and the sick, the manananggal represents one of the deepest fears in the Filipino psyche: the terror of something that looks human splitting itself in two. In the context of the diaspora, this image becomes something more—a metaphor for the immigrant who is, quite literally, severed from their homeland. In Forgotten Island, the manananggal serves not simply as a villain but as a guardian of the island's secrets, a gatekeeper between the world of memory and the world of forgetting. This is a significant departure from traditional depictions, and one that elevates the creature from folk horror into cultural allegory.
The Bestiary of the Forgotten: Filipino Mythology on the Big Screen
The manananggal is only the beginning. Based on the official trailer and production details, Nakali is populated by a full ecosystem of creatures drawn from Philippine folklore—many of which have never appeared in a major Western film. The aswang, the shape-shifting creature that haunts the provinces and the imaginations of every kid who ever stayed at their lola's house in the province, has been reimagined as Raww—a bumbling, comedic weredog voiced by Dave Franco. It is a clever subversion: the aswang, traditionally one of the most feared figures in Filipino mythology, becomes a hapless companion, stripping the creature of its colonial-era demonization and restoring something warmer, more human, more kapwa.
The trailer also reveals visual motifs drawn from the sarimanok—the legendary bird of the Maranao people in Mindanao, a symbol of good fortune and prestige that appears throughout Islamic Filipino art and architecture. There are glimpses of what appear to be anitos (ancestral spirits), diwatas (nature spirits and guardians), and the nuno sa punso (the old man of the mound, a goblin-like earth spirit). The portal mechanism itself appears to draw from the sun symbol on the Philippine flag—that eight-rayed sun representing liberty and the provinces, here repurposed as a gateway between worlds.
What DreamWorks and its Filipino-American co-director Januel Mercado have done is build a cinematic universe out of the stories that our lolas told us at bedtime. Stories that were never written down in any Disney princess handbook. Stories that predated Spanish colonization. Stories that survived four hundred years of being dismissed as superstition by the very colonial powers that tried to replace them with saints. To see them rendered in the same animation technology that brought us Shrek and the Wild Robot is not merely exciting. It is, in a word I do not use lightly, historic.
The 90s as a Pre-Digital Anchor
The decision to set Forgotten Island in the 1990s is not nostalgic. It is strategic. The 90s represent the last era of Filipino migration before the digital revolution fundamentally altered the immigrant experience. Before Skype and Facebook and WhatsApp, leaving the Philippines meant leaving. When my parents left Marikina for Chicago in 1975, communication was reduced to aerograms—those thin blue airmail letters that took weeks to arrive and carried the weight of entire lifetimes in a few hundred words. By the time I arrived in 1976, my Tita Gigi, my lolo, my titas and titos, and the kids on Carmine Street were reduced to voices on expensive long-distance phone calls and photographs that were already months out of date by the time they reached our mailbox.
The 90s still carried that weight. You could not FaceTime your ninang on her birthday. You could not scroll through your cousin's Instagram stories from Quezon City. When you left, the separation was physical, real, and total. Your memories of the people you left behind were all you had. And they faded. They faded the way Nakali takes them—slowly, imperceptibly, and then all at once.
Crawford and Mercado understand this. The film's cinematographic approach, which Mercado described as using wider lenses and light leaks to evoke the feeling of old photographs and camcorder footage, is directly connected to the theme. Memory in the 90s was analog. It was a VHS tape that degraded with each viewing. It was a Polaroid that yellowed. It was a cassette of OPM ballads that your tita recorded off the radio and mailed to you from Manila. The 90s setting is not a costume. It is the story's beating heart.
— Januel Mercado, Co-Director, Forgotten Island
Pakikipagkapwa vs. Individualism: The Deeper Stakes
At its philosophical core, Forgotten Island stages a confrontation between two worldviews that every Filipino-American navigates daily: pakikipagkapwa—the Filipino value of shared identity, of recognizing yourself in others, of treating community as an extension of self—and the Western emphasis on individual achievement, personal freedom, and forward motion at any cost. Raissa is being moved to the United States by her parents. She did not choose this. The decision was made for her, as it was made for millions of Filipino children, because America represents opportunity, education, economic mobility. The promise of the American Dream.
But the film asks: what do you pay for that promise? The answer, on Nakali, is literal. You pay with your memories. You pay with the bonds that made you who you are. You pay with the face of your best friend, dissolving like a photograph left in the sun.
This is not a children's metaphor. This is the lived reality of the diaspora. I have watched it happen to my own children. Veronica, JianCarlo, and Francesca are proud of being Filipino—I have made sure of that. But they did not grow up in Marikina or Metro Manila. They did not play sipa in the street. They did not ride the jeepney to Malate to visit their lola. Nor take the long train ride to Ligao, Albay in Bicol. Their Filipino identity is inherited, not experienced. And inheritance, without active preservation, becomes myth. Becomes folklore. Becomes the kind of story you tell at Thanksgiving between bites of turkey, because the lechon is too hard to source in Hiddenbrooke.
Forgotten Island takes that quiet, generational erosion and gives it teeth. It gives it wings. It gives it the voice of Lea Salonga.
The Sound of Nakali: Nathan Matthew David's Score
The film's score is composed by Nathan Matthew David, and while we have heard only fragments in the trailer, the sonic palette suggests something genuinely new: a fusion of contemporary R&B textures with traditional Filipino instrumentation, including what appears to be kulintang—the gong ensemble music of the Maguindanao and Maranao peoples of Mindanao. If this holds true across the full score, it represents yet another layer of cultural specificity that elevates the film beyond the generic "world music" wallpaper that Hollywood typically slathers onto stories set in non-Western countries. Filipino music is not one thing. It is kulintang and harana and kundiman and OPM and hip-hop and the karaoke machine in your tita's living room at 2 a.m. A score that honors even a fraction of that range is a score worth celebrating.
The Creative Partnership: Crawford and Mercado
The film's co-directors met as storyboard artists on Kung Fu Panda 2 nearly two decades ago. Crawford, who directed The Croods: A New Age and the Oscar-nominated Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, spoke at the trailer event about finding a kindred spirit in Mercado—about Mercado's ability to make everyone around him feel safe and seen. Mercado, for his part, described the creative process as rooted in their own friendship, saying that starting from a place of trust made the immense pressure of an original feature feel manageable.
Forgotten Island marks Mercado's first full directing credit. For a Filipino-American animator who has spent nearly twenty years working within DreamWorks' system—contributing to massive franchises, building his craft in the background—this is the moment. And it is not lost on this writer that Mercado chose to use that moment to tell a story about the Philippines. To bring our mythology to the screen not as exotica, not as "cultural wallpaper," but as the foundation of an entire world. Crawford described their research trip to the Philippines as the turning point, the moment they moved beyond surface-level representation into something authentic. That authenticity radiates from every frame of the trailer.
The Full Cast: A Community Effort
Beyond the leads, the voice cast reads like a roll call of Filipino and Filipino-American talent across generations and disciplines. Manny Jacinto, who broke through in The Good Place and earned widespread praise in The Acolyte, lends his voice to the ensemble. Jo Koy—the stand-up comedian who has made a career out of celebrating (and roasting) Filipino family life—joined the cast in March 2026 alongside BAFTA-nominated Dolly de Leon, whose devastating performance in Triangle of Sadness introduced global arthouse audiences to Filipino acting talent. Ronny Chieng and Jenny Slate round out a cast that bridges Filipino, Asian-American, and mainstream Hollywood talent with the ease of a Sunday potluck at your ninang's house.
The addition of Amielynn Abellera—a Filipino-American voice actress and comedian—further deepens the bench. This is not a film that hired one or two Filipino actors for authenticity points. This is a production that staffed its cast with the Filipino community's own, from the A-list to the emerging voices.
Why This Matters: The Bigger Picture
Let me be direct. In the thirty-year history of DreamWorks Animation—a studio that has produced Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and The Wild Robot—there has never been a film centered on Filipino culture. In the century-long history of mainstream American animation, there has never been a major theatrical release built entirely on the foundation of Philippine mythology. Not from Disney. Not from Pixar. Not from Illumination. Not from anyone.
Until now.
The significance of this cannot be overstated. When Coco brought Día de los Muertos to the screen in 2017, it gave Mexican and Mexican-American families a mirror. When Moana drew from Polynesian navigation traditions, it electrified Pacific Islander communities worldwide. When Turning Red centered the Chinese-Canadian immigrant experience, it validated a generation of kids who had never seen their lives reflected in a Pixar film. Forgotten Island is that moment for Filipinos. And it arrives at a time when the Filipino-American community is at an inflection point—4.6 million strong, the second-largest Asian-American group in the United States, increasingly visible in entertainment, politics, healthcare, and technology, yet still chronically underrepresented in the cultural narratives that shape how America sees us and how we see ourselves.
This film will not fix that underrepresentation overnight. One movie never does. But it will do something perhaps more important: it will give an entire generation of Filipino-American children a story that tells them their mythology is not primitive, their folklore is not superstition, their culture is not a footnote. It is the foundation of a world so vivid, so complete, so beautiful that DreamWorks Animation bet its 50th feature film on it.
A Legacy of Memory
At its core, PinoyBuilt.com was created to be a fortress against cultural amnesia—the same phantom that haunts the shores of Nakali in Forgotten Island. As a member of the diaspora who landed in cosmopolitan Chicago in '76 and later found a home in the valleys of Vallejo, I have seen how easily our stories can be swept away by the current of assimilation. We exist to document, to preserve, and to claim our space in the American narrative.
Talagang masaya ako na darating ang Forgotten Island. It is more than a piece of animation; it is a ritual of recognition. I find myself thinking of my own children—Veronica, JianCarlo, and Francesca—and their friends who are navigating what it means to be Filipino in this modern world. I think of the Fil-Am friends I grew up with from the 70s and 80s, in Chicago and Vallejo and Davis, and I hope they see this film and feel that same spark of Filipino Strength and Pinoy Pride that I felt when I first stepped onto these shores of Turtle Island.
I think of Tess. My late wife, born in Valencia, Bukidnon, fluent in Bisaya and Tagalog, who would have watched this trailer with tears in her eyes and immediately forwarded it to every Garcia and Baluyut in her phone. I think about what she would have said to our kids: Anak, look. They are telling our stories now.
This movie is a reminder that even when we move forward, we must look back. To my kids: Remember your mother. Remember her island—the vibrant life of Valencia, Bukidnon and the language she spoke with such grace. Remember your culture. It is the one thing that can never be stolen if you choose to hold onto it.
Forgotten Island opens in theaters September 25, 2026. Mark the date. Bring your family. Bring your lola. Bring the kid who thinks Filipino just means lumpia at the school potluck. Show them Nakali. Show them the manananggal. Show them that our stories have always been big enough for the biggest screen in the world.
We just had to remember them first. Kailangan lang muna nating silang alalahanin.
Variety — "'Forgotten Island' Trailer: H.E.R. and Liza Soberano Star in DreamWorks' Filipino Folklore-Inspired Animated Movie" (March 25, 2026)
IndieWire — "'Forgotten Island' Trailer: DreamWorks' Latest Animated Adventure Follows a Fraying Friendship" (March 25, 2026)
The Nerds of Color — "How DreamWorks' 'Forgotten Island' Fosters Filipino Culture and Folklore" (March 25, 2026)
The Manila Times — "Jeepney, manananggal and Filipino icons bring to life DreamWorks' 'Forgotten Island'" (March 26, 2026)
Cebu Daily News / Inquirer — "'Forgotten Island': Strong Filipino cast in DreamWorks' animation film" (March 26, 2026)
GMA News Online — "'Forgotten Island': Liza Soberano, H.E.R. voice besties in Philippines-inspired animated film" (March 26, 2026)
Deadline — "DreamWorks Animation's 'Forgotten Island' Release Date Is Fall 2026" (April 15, 2025)
Wikipedia — "Forgotten Island"
Wikipedia — "H.E.R."
Help Us Become the #1 Filipino-American Media Platform in the U.S.
PinoyBuilt is built by the community, for the community. If this article meant something to you — if it made you proud, informed, or connected — we need your help to reach every kababayan out there.
💬 Drop a comment below — tell us which Filipino folklore creature you grew up most afraid of.
📲 Text this article to a friend, a tita, a teammate — anyone who needs to see this.
📣 Share it on your socials — every share brings us closer.
4.6 million Filipinos in the U.S. One platform telling our stories. Salamat, kababayan.
Forgotten Island is set to be a landmark film in Philippine history. It represents a landmark moment for Filipino representation in global cinema.
ReplyDelete