The animated film-starring Dwayne Johnson and newcomer Auli’i Cravalho, with music from “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda-is rooted in Polynesian myth and tells the story of Moana, who is destined to become the chief of her people but is drawn to the ocean despite her father’s warnings against exploring beyond the reef.
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In fact, the movie’s themes and ironic humor feel so contemporary that it’s easy to forget how far in the past this fable is set as Moana, told by her grandmother of an ancient prophesy that may have doomed her people, embarks on an epic sailing adventure to battle the gods and break the spell. I hadn’t seen the trailers, and I was surprised and impressed by the scale of Moana.
“Moana” isn’t just a good time at the theater, it’s exactly the kind of movie we need. “But I think the main thing is that she’s a heroine of her own story, and I think that’s so important”.
When asked if there is any additional pressure coming on the heels of “Frozen”, Disney Animation Studios’ last animated musical, Derrick offered an emphatic “no”. “And they’re always well-intended and you want it to do great, but with this one, I had a feeling early that at least we had a shot at really creating something special and something unique”, Johnson said.
The film now has a 99% score on review Rotten Tomatoes, which would make it one of the best reviewed films of the year, and stars of one of Hollywood’s biggest box office forces in Johnson, who has raked in more than $6.5 billion worldwide, according to comScore. “That was something we’ve never done before”. We just needed to re-define them. It was figuring out how can we communicate those things. It’s a fable of nature disturbed and restored to harmony, but also about the individual connecting to a philosophy of living and a culture that has forgotten its identity finding its way home (offering hope for our destabilized land of opportunity). The staff is so good. Hyrum Osmond is the film’s co-head of animation and has spent nine years at Disney working on familiar titles like “Tangled” and “Wreck-It Ralph”. “Certainly as John said, some aspects of some of the earlier designs came from caricature where you tend to sort of [exaggerate]”. In the current global climate, Moana’s quest to make the world a better place is something that the world sorely needs.
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Disney has (thankfully) slowly been shifting away from that; most of its modern princesses are actually fairly anti-princess. “There’s a lot of skin exposed on the characters so we wanted to make sure [the audience] felt like it was [seeing] musculature and bone underneath when they moved”. There’s a monster or demon realm within the underworld which is, in the myth, a world that does exist under the ocean… But the heroine proves to be a resourceful adventurer when the pair is ambushed by tiny pirates and come to cross paths with a villain giant crab Tamatoa (voiced by Jemaine Clement). We read the Myth of the Headless Warrior and we thought that seemed cool and we made him a collector, we put him down at the bottom of the ocean, but then he didn’t speak at all. This also ties in nicely with the cultural element featured throughout the film and what Clements, Musker and the animators do with the ocean is highly inventive. However, they are such vastly different films in scope, story and ideas, one nearly finds it unnecessary comparing the two. Even so, the Disney machine ensures that Moana is crowd-pleasing and upbeat, an ideal movie for families to see together over the holiday weekend.
