DreamWorks Animation has unveiled the first official trailer for ‘Forgotten Island,’ an original film rooted in Filipino folklore that marks Grammy winner H.E.R.’s voice acting debut.
DreamWorks Animation has released the first official trailer for Forgotten Island, an original animated feature rooted in Filipino mythology that is generating considerable early buzz for both its cultural ambition and its star power. The film is set for a theatrical release on Sept. 25, 2026, distributed by Universal Pictures, and it arrives as one of the more distinctive animated projects in recent memory — a friendship story wrapped in folklore, nostalgia and a visual style unlike anything DreamWorks has attempted before.
The trailer was unveiled at DreamWorks headquarters in Glendale, Calif., with the film’s 2 lead voice cast members present: 1) Grammy and Academy Award-winning artist H.E.R, who makes her animated voice acting debut in the film, and 2) Filipino-American actress and model Liza Soberano, who has long been one of the most recognizable faces in Philippine entertainment. The two play Jo and Raissa, lifelong best friends navigating the bittersweet transition out of high school — and, as it turns out, a very unexpected detour into another world entirely.
Co-director Januel Mercado, who helmed the film alongside Joel Crawford — the pair previously collaborated on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish — made a deliberate choice to set the story in the 1990s. The reasoning was deeply personal: that era captured a time before smartphones and social media, when friendships felt more permanent and every shared moment carried greater weight. The Polaroid camera becomes a meaningful narrative device within the film, with exactly 12 shots available to the characters — a finite resource that forces genuinely consequential choices about which moments deserve to be preserved.