Kelly Marie Tran is the latest actor to appear on IMDb’s “Movies That Changed My Life” podcast.
Soon to be seen in the upcoming Disney+ animated epic “Raya and the Last Dragon” — in which she provides the voice of the Asian heroine — Tran singled out another Disney classic with an Asian girl as the protagonist: “Mulan”.
Tran recalled seeing the movie “right when it came out. I was not even 10 years old. I think I was like 9. And this movie means so much to me. I think I’ve seen it, I’m not exaggerating, maybe over 100 times. Like once we got the VHS, we just watched it over and over and over,” she said. “It really was the first time I ever saw myself in anything. And yeah, I can, some of those lines, man, that movie is quotable.”
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Years later, Tran met Ming-Na Wen, who voiced Mulan, at the premiere of “The Last Jedi”, and recalled that “it was like an emotional moment for me for sure, ’cause I have looked up to her for many years…”
The next movie she picked wasn’t a single movie, but the entire “Harry Potter” saga. “Every single one is perfect,” she said of the films.
Asked to pick her favourite, she admitted, “I really can’t choose to be honest. I can’t, I can’t choose. Like they’re all good for their own reasons. And also like, I think what’s crazy to me is like I remember some of the things that I was emotionally going through when I read these books or when I watched these movies. And I think that’s why I can’t really choose, because it’s so associated with my like growing up into adulthood.”
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She also pointed to Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” as being a particularly influential film in her life.
“I think it was, yeah, when it first came out, so 2006. I was in high school, and that movie is so haunting. It just stayed with me,” said Train. “I actually watched it pretty recently like maybe a couple of months ago. Like I just, it’s one of my favourite movies. I just felt like it was ingenious in the ways in which it explored war but also in a way that took you into a child’s perception of it. And I’m just obsessed with GDT.”
Tran’s entire episode can be heard below: