Missouri native creates her own Korean princess musical on TikTok: ‘Disney, hire her’
A 22-year-old Missouri native is crafting the Korean princess story she’s longed to see since she was child. She’s sharing her musical, which doubles as her Harvard thesis, on TikTok piece-by-piece while fans clamor for more.
“There was no Korean Disney princess so I decided to make my own,” Julia Riew wrote on her first TikTok video on Jan. 7 featuring her musical entitled, “Shimcheong: A Folktale.”
The next day, she noticed the views on her initial video, featuring her singing one of the original songs, “Dive,” starting to climb, Riew told KSDK. In one month, Riew’s initial video has reached over 968,000 views and nearly a quarter of a million likes.
Her musical is blend of a classic Korean folktale, “The Blind Man’s Daughter,” and Riew’s personal experiences looking for belonging as a Korean American.
“‘Shimcheong: A Folktale’ is the Disney movie that I wish I could’ve grown up seeing as a Korean-American kid,” she said in one of her videos.
“Shimcheong dives into the ocean as a very young girl and then sort of grows up in the Dragon Kingdom. The story is really about her returning home and trying to reclaim this identity that she’s lost,” Riew explained to KSDK. “And that, for me, comes from a lot of my own personal story of growing up in Missouri and then going to Korea for the first time when I was 18 years old.”
Riew uses a Snapchat filter to give herself a cartoon-like appearance in her TikTok videos when she sings as the main character in her musical, she told Today.
According to her website, Riew is from St. Louis and New York City, and she hopes to create the next genre of family musicals that are based on “cultural appreciation, rather than appropriation.”
Riew says she has over 15 songs completed for the musical plus a full script. After returning to Harvard University after Christmas break, she began hosting auditions to put on a full performance of the project at the end of this semester.
“Seeing a Korean Disney princess growing up would have helped a lot in my struggle of being proud of my Korean heritage,” one fan of Riew’s musical commented.
Since her videos gained traction online, Riew has invited singers, actors and artists to duet her videos, sing over her karaoke tracks, sketch art and reach out (or simply mention Disney’s TikTok handle in the comments) to help her “show Disney that this is the project that they’re missing.”
“Yo @Disney, hire her,” demanded one commenter.
Riew told Today that various film and theater producers have already reached out to her regarding the future of her musical.
“I’m currently in talks with just a couple different people to try to see what the future of the project might look like. It’s not super settled,” she told the news outlet. “Of course, the absolute dream would be to see it as an animated feature or on a Broadway stage.”
This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 11:30 AM with the headline "Missouri native creates her own Korean princess musical on TikTok: ‘Disney, hire her’."
