Pinoy Pride Takes Center Stage in DreamWorks’ Latest Adventure
Friendship, myths, and memories collide as ‘Forgotten Island’ reminds you what it really means to remember
Words Bernadette Soriano
Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures and DreamWorks
April 02, 2026
DreamWorks Animation’s latest original feature, ‘Forgotten Island,’ unveiled its first trailer on March 25, this time shifting the gravitational center of fantasy from vaguely European mythscapes to something far more intimate, if long under-animated: the Filipino imagination.
From its opening beats, the trailer signals this shift with deliberate local texture—Jo and Raissa are first seen idly toying with a balisong, before later lounging atop the hood of a traditional jeepney, grounding their world in the familiar.
The transition to the fantastical is equally rooted: a radiant portal, shaped like the sun from the Philippine flag, ushers them into the unknown, where a Sarimanok stirs them awake on the island, as if folklore itself were calling them into consciousness.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Forgotten Island via YouTube
Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the tandem behind the stylistically assured Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the film opens on a premise that feels deceptively familiar.
Two best friends, Jo and Raissa, voiced by Oscar– and Grammy–winning songstress H.E.R. and FAMAS–award–winning Liza Soberano, stand at the threshold of divergence: adulthood, distance, and the gradual erosion of constancy. It is, in other words, a story about endings masquerading as beginnings.
The island of Nakali, where the pair are unceremoniously delivered, is not constructed as a generic “enchanted elsewhere.” It is, instead, an archive: late-night fables populated by creatures that many Filipinos first encounter not in books, but in warnings.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Forgotten Island via YouTube
Accompanied by the affably blundering weredog Raww, voiced by Dave Franco, and some pint-sized gutsies, Jo and Raissa must confront the island’s most fearsome inhabitant, the Manananggal, voiced by theater royalty Lea Salonga, a memory given to teeth, the kind that creeps in childhood, shapeless until suddenly, it isn’t.
Cleverly framed, ‘Forgotten Island’ resists the Western impulse to treat myth as disposable. Here, myth is a residual imprint, carried across generations. And at its heart, to return home, Jo and Raissa must surrender the most intimate treasure of all: the memory of their friendship.
This is where the motion picture’s emotional baseline reveals itself. Memory is an active tether. Lose it, and you don’t just forget; you erase the story you share.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Forgotten Island via YouTube
One is reminded, faintly, of how Filipino storytelling traditions, oral, iterative, even communal, treat reminiscence not as one that is owned, but as one lived in connection, because you remember only insofar as others remember you.
The casting, notably, reads like a careful calibration between global appeal and cultural specificity. Alongside Soberano and H.E.R. are critically lauded actor Manny Jacinto, BAFTA nominee Dolly de Leon, crowd-beloved comic Jo Koy, Emmy-winning satirist Ronny Chieng, and Emmy-nominated maven Jenny Slate—a lineup that gestures toward diaspora without fully dissolving into it. It is a feature conscious of the gaze both within and afar.
Lingering above all is its bold venture: that the Philippine ancestral tides, long nudged to the edges of global animation, can sustain aesthetic intrigue, alongside the heft of emotional weight. That a friendship on the verge of forgetting can carry the same narrative urgency as any kingdom in peril.
The film hits Philippine cinemas this September 23. Whether it lands fully is anyone’s guess. Even so, it hints at something long overdue: the stories we grew up half-believing, half-fearing, finally told at scale. True to their voice, anchored in their context, and remembered for the people they were always meant to reach.
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