DreamWorks made the first major animated feature built from Philippine mythology, and the legend the film never mentions is an invisible city with delivery trucks and a rule about black rice.
Start with the man in the director’s chair. Januel Mercado joined the DreamWorks story department in 2008 and spent close to two decades working on other people’s films. Kung Fu Panda, Penguins of Madagascar, Turbo, Trolls. He became head of story on The Croods: A New Age, co-directed Puss in Boots: The Last Wish with Joel Crawford, and with Forgotten Island took his first full directing credit.
He is, as far as I can find, the first Filipino-American to direct a major Hollywood animated feature built from Filipino source material. Every choice about which creatures made it into the film and which legends stayed in the research notes ran through someone who grew up hearing these stories in his own family.
The film debuted with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score on its earliest reviews and settled at 94 percent from 133 critics. In the Philippines it earned 97 million pesos on opening weekend, the biggest opening for any DreamWorks Animation release in the country’s history. Globally the numbers were less welcoming. Against a reported 80-million-dollar production budget, Forgotten Island reached about 76 million worldwide by early November. Filipino audiences showed up in record numbers. The broader international audience, without a lola and a kitchen-table creature catalogue, largely did not.
The soundtrack is 37 tracks long. Nathan Matthew David, a Filipino-American composer with credits on Joy Ride and The Brothers Sun, scored the film and co-wrote BINI’s “A Parallel World” with Shawn Wasabi. The album is not a conventional score with one pop single attached. The producers filled it with OPM covers and Filipino karaoke favorites from the 1980s and 1990s, the songs that show up at every birthday party and every road trip through the provinces.
SB19 covered Francis Magalona’s “Mga Kababayan Ko,” a patriotic hip-hop anthem from the early nineties by the man the Philippines called the Master Rapper. Magalona died of leukemia in 2009 at forty-four, and hearing his anthem revived by the biggest boy band in the Philippines, inside a Hollywood film about Filipino mythology, closes a loop across seventeen years and half the planet.
KATSEYE’s Sophia recorded “Never Tear Us Apart.” H.E.R. and Liza Soberano open the album with a duet called “BRB.” The playlist reads like a time capsule of the music a Filipino kid raised abroad would hear on visits back home.
BINI performed “A Parallel World” live at San Diego Comic-Con in July, during the official DreamWorks panel in Ballroom 20. It was the group’s first time on a Comic-Con stage. They had teased the track a month earlier at the opening of their Signals World Tour, and the studio single went up on streaming platforms on July 23, the day before the panel. Multiple outlets reported it is the only fully original song on a soundtrack otherwise assembled from covers and score cues.
The casting deserves a closer look. Lea Salonga, who voices the manananggal, sang for Princess Jasmine in Aladdin in 1992 and for Mulan in 1998. Disney named her a Legend in 2011. She became the first Filipina to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The voice half the world grew up associating with Disney princesses now belongs to the creature Filipino children fear most.
Liza Soberano, voicing Raissa, already knew how to carry Philippine mythology: she is Alexandra Trese in Netflix’s animated series based on the Filipino comic about supernatural crime in Manila. In interviews she described preparing for Raissa by speaking from her chest voice to sound deeper but still youthful, grounding the character’s emotional moments in tampuhan, the Filipino art of sulking, rather than heavy melodrama.
H.E.R., born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson in Vallejo, California, has a Filipino mother and grew up listening to Sharon Cuneta. And Dolly de Leon, the BAFTA-nominated actress from Triangle of Sadness, voices Lola Fatima, Jo’s grandmother, the character who actually tells the girls about Nakali in the first place.
That casting is worth sitting with: the woman who connects the diaspora kids to their own mythology is played by the Filipino actress the international art-house audience already knows. Every lead voice carries a personal line back to the Philippines, all the way through to the director’s chair.
The episode traces each creature to its folklore roots, and a few of those roots go deeper than the video had room for. Juan de Plasencia’s account of the tiyanak’s ancestor, the patianak, appears in Relacion de las Costumbres de Los Tagalos, dated 1589. The original manuscript sits in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, and an English translation appeared in the early twentieth century in volume seven of Blair and Robertson’s compilation The Philippine Islands.
Plasencia’s patianak is tied to women who died in childbirth, a spirit of maternal grief. The infant crying in the forest, the shapeshifting, the sharp teeth, all came later, layered across centuries as communities reshaped the figure to match new fears. The word itself links to the Malay pontianak, the spirit of a woman who died pregnant, still a fixture of Malaysian and Indonesian cinema today.
Philippine medical literature documented bangungot cases as early as 1917. Among Filipino men between 25 and 44, the reported annual rate runs between 38 and 43 per 100,000, depending on the study. In 1992, the Catalan cardiologist brothers Pedro and Josep Brugada published a paper identifying a heritable heart rhythm disorder that can stop an apparently healthy heart during sleep. Japanese researchers studying the same phenomenon named it Brugada syndrome in 1996.
Whether that disorder is also the primary cause of Philippine bangungot remains unsettled. Some Filipino physicians point instead to acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis. The Philippine Heart Association has urged families with a history of sudden sleep deaths to get cardiac screening, because the Brugada defect is hereditary and a routine ECG can flag carriers before anything goes wrong.
The episode mentions that nearly every culture built a demon for sleep paralysis. The global list is staggering. In Turkey the figure is called karabasan, roughly “the dark presser.” In Japan, kanashibari. In China, guǐ yā shēn, “ghost pressing on body.” In Thailand, phi am. In Hmong communities, dab tsog. In Newfoundland, the “Old Hag.” The English word nightmare still carries the Germanic mare inside it, the female spirit who rides your chest in the dark.
A Dutch physician published the first clinical description in Western medicine in 1664 and labeled the experience “Incubus or the Night-Mare.” The Ilocano batibat, arriving independently at the same image of a heavy female weight pressing on a sleeping person’s chest, is one of hundreds of parallel inventions worldwide. The body in sleep paralysis gives the same report everywhere. Only the names differ.
The manananggal’s relatives reach across Southeast Asia. In Malaysia, the penanggalan detaches at the neck rather than the waist and flies as a severed head with her intestines trailing below. In Thailand, the krasue is nearly identical. Both prey on pregnant women. Both can be destroyed by sunlight or by salt applied to the exposed separation point. The Philippines has the torso-separating version, the Malay Peninsula and Thailand have the head-separating one, and the fear driving all of them is the same.
The episode calls the kataw sea royalty, and the hierarchy underneath that title is worth examining. Visayan folklore places the kataw above the sirena, the fish-tailed mermaid, and the siyokoy, the scaled deep-water predator. Some accounts describe the kataw as rulers of a domain called Bantay Tubig, guardians of the water. The more human a sea spirit looks in this ranking, the higher it sits. That same logic carries onto land. The engkantos of Biringan are described as tall, pale, beautiful, and nearly impossible to tell apart from ordinary people.
The giveaway, according to the folklore, is the philtrum, the small vertical groove between the nose and the upper lip. Engkantos do not have one. It is a strangely precise anatomical marker for a folk legend. Medically, the human philtrum is considered vestigial, a leftover from fetal development with no active function. The folklore picked one of the least noticeable features on a face and turned its absence into proof of the supernatural.
Now, Biringan.
In July 2026, The Summit Express reported that historian Jhonil C. Bajado of Samar State University had found a Spanish-era land deed recording the sale of three hectares in a place called Sitio de Beringan, under the municipality of Tarangnan, Samar. The seller was Felix Ramos, the buyer Gaudencio Farrales, the price 40 pesos. This is colonial-era paperwork, potentially centuries older than the 1960s delivery stories usually treated as the legend’s starting point.
The name Biringan, in its older spelling Beringan, turns up in the archives as a real sitio, a small official settlement designation, in the exact province where folklore places the invisible city. A real place name on a real deed in the right location. It may have vanished from the maps and grown into something larger in the telling.
Bajado is also the source for the seven portals. He describes seven entry points scattered across western, eastern, and northern Samar. The most frequently cited is an old tree on the grounds of Northwest Samar State University. Others cluster around large trees in Pagsanghan. The portal tradition ties directly to the balete, the strangler fig that Philippine folklore treats as a dwelling place for engkantos. People who claim they visited Biringan and returned describe waking up beneath one of these trees with no memory of how they arrived.
In 2022, GMA’s investigative program Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho sent a crew to Samar after a viewer submitted footage he believed showed the city. The team traveled to the area with local guides and provincial authorities. The segment brought the legend back to national television for a generation that had grown up after the earlier documentaries.
The episode covers the CIA’s aswang operation against the Huk guerrillas and notes that Edward Lansdale described it in his 1972 autobiography, In the Midst of Wars. One detail the video moves through quickly: the aswang ruse sat inside a wider psychological operations playbook. Lansdale’s teams also painted a large staring eye on the walls of suspected Huk sympathizers’ houses in the night, an operation called the Eye of God.
The homeowner would wake up to find it watching from his own wall. Lansdale later deployed similar psychological techniques in Vietnam, but the Philippines was the only campaign where his team reached into the local folklore and weaponized it. The creatures were just one tool. The principle was always the same: study what your enemy already fears and put it on his doorstep.
Biringan was on Philippine screens before Forgotten Island. Director Chito S. Roño, born in Calbayog, Samar, made T2 in 2009, a horror film whose final eleven minutes take place inside a computer-generated version of the invisible city. Roño once said his uncle, a former Philippine Airlines manager, claimed he saw Biringan from an airplane window.
The film earned 95 million pesos. A separate production company announced a new Biringan project in 2024. Filmmakers keep circling the legend, and each one discovers the same difficulty: the city’s real power is not an attack but a welcome so warm that leaving stops being an option.
A professor at Samar State University offered a reading that adds another foundation to the whole legend. She suggested that when people in Samar describe seeing Biringan, a metropolis of skyscrapers and advanced technology, they may be projecting the infrastructure and progress the province has never had. Samar is among the poorest provinces in the Philippines. The invisible city contains everything Samar lacks. That interpretation does not dismantle the folklore. It deepens it. Biringan is where the lost go. It is also the version of home that was never built.
And then there is the food. In Filipino culture, offering food is the first act of welcome, and refusing a meal someone has prepared for you is close to an insult. Biringan takes that social code and turns it into the lock on the cage. The one place in all of Filipino folklore where refusing food is the only way to survive is also the place designed to feel like the most generous home you have ever entered. That same tension runs through Forgotten Island.
The film’s version of the batibat, named Batiba, is specifically a memory collector. She does not sit on your chest. She trades in your memories, offering passage in exchange for the things that connect you to who you were. The island does not threaten Jo and Raissa. It welcomes them so completely that their memories begin to dissolve. DreamWorks swapped the black rice for fading memories, but the mechanism stayed.
A Filipino-American director and a cast drawn from the diaspora built this film on folklore and OPM karaoke, and still nobody said the word Biringan on screen. A Spanish deed in Samar says the name was real once. A local historian mapped seven doors into it.
A director from the province rendered eleven minutes of it in CGI in 2009. GMA investigated it on national television in 2022. And in September 2026, DreamWorks walked up to the perimeter and politely turned around. The legend carries real disappearances and real families, and the choice to leave it unnamed was respect.
If Biringan is the place where lost things end up, what would be waiting for you inside? Tell me in the comments.
Leave a Reply