Composer Shawn Wasabi Talks Forgotten Island, Fandom, and His First SDCC as a Pro

Shawn Wasabi has been to San Diego Comic-Con plenty of times, but this year, for the first time, he walked the floor as a professional instead of a fan. He joinedTHS to discuss his recent project, and how delighted he’s been to experience the event from this side.

“Being here as a fan is a very fun experience,” he said, running through the version of Comic-Con most attendees know: the curiosity, the cosplay, seeing people whose music you’ve had on repeat, saving up all year for the trip. “It feels like you’re on an adventure from the moment you wake up at your hotel.”

That fan-first instinct, he pointed out, isn’t really separate from his work as a producer; in fact, it is more or less the engine behind it. His music leans heavily on sampling and interactivity, the same impulse that turns a convention floor into a scavenger hunt for the people you admire.

The reason Wasabi had a professional badge this year is “Forgotten Island,” DreamWorks Animation’s new film from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, which hits theaters September 25. Wasabi produced the film’s original song “A Parallel World,” pulling from an unusually wide net of references. He was brought onto the project by the film’s composer, Nathan Matthew David, and the two of them, along with directors Joel and Jan, built something close to a genuine friendship out of it. “They’re the most fearlessly, brazenly creative people,” Wasabi said, describing sessions where ideas get thrown at the wall, sometimes argued over, and somehow still land somewhere everyone’s proud of by the end of the day.

There’s a personal layer to the project that clearly still catches him off guard. Forgotten Island leans into Filipino mythology and culture, and watching those elements rendered on screen hit Wasabi harder than he expected. THS covered the film’s early first-look footage, and there’s clearly more going on under the hood than a typical animated adventure.

When discussing how his creative mind works, Wasabi revealed that as a kid he didn’t understand how music got made. He assumed the people on the radio were singing live, in real time, whenever a song came on. That misunderstanding basically became his career. Sampling, to him, is an extension of that childhood confusion: taking a sound, a voice, a moment, and making it feel like it’s happening live all over again. It’s part of why his sets and his production style lean so hard into performance and reaction rather than a fixed, finished track.

Forgotten Island lands in theaters September 25, with “A Parallel World” leading a soundtrack that’s already stacked with names like H.E.R., Lea Salonga, and BINI. For more on THS’s ongoing SDCC 2026 coverage of the films and music behind them, check out the full music section.