Brandon Yu March 4, 2021Updated: March 4, 2021, 3:47 pm
Kelly Marie Tran (left, with Daisy Ridley in 2019’s “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”) is the lead voice of the new Disney animated film “Raya and the Last Dragon.” Photo: Jonathan Olley, Lucasfilm Ltd.
In 2018, months after Kelly Marie Tran had appeared onscreen in the latest installment of the “Star Wars” franchise, she wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. It was at once a raw account of the quiet racism she had internalized growing up in San Diego as a Vietnamese American incidents mirrored by a wave of vitriolic online attacks directed at her amid her role in “The Last Jedi” and also a fiery, aggrieved stand against being shaped by such ugly experiences.
In the past 10 years or so, Walt Disney Studios has been trying to rectify a big blind spot in its history by putting people of color as leads in their anima