With their latest animated feature, Moana, Disney is charting a course for new territory. Centered on a great historical mystery, Moana delves into the culture of the Pacific Islands through the imagined narrative of its title heroine. 3000 years ago, the Pacific Islanders were the greatest navigators the world had ever seen, finding their way across the Pacific Ocean without the assistance of any nautical instruments, working their way from west to east in one of history’s greatest feats of exploration.
But one day, the voyaging stopped, without any explanation, and for a thousand years, the entire culture stopped migrating. Then, generations later, again without explanation, they took to the seas once more. They began to explore even further, populating the Eastern Pacific islands along the way. No one knows why the voyaging stopped. No one knows why it started again, but through the imagination of directors Ron Clements and John Musker (Aladdin, The Little Mermaid) a new cinematic myth emerges with Moana. Centered around the titular young explorer (voiced by newcomer Auliʻi Cravalho) — the daughter of her island’s chief (and ruler in training) — who forms an unlikely alliance with the great demigod Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson), discovering her fate as a great explorer and rekindling the voyaging spirit of her culture.
Back in July, I visited Walt Disney Studios for a behind-the-scenes look at the incredibly detailed and extensive process behind the making of Moana. We had a chance to speak with the story team, animation department, and the production and costume designers, among others. Check out the highlights of what I learned below.
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- During their visits, they established what they call their Oceanic Story trust, consisting of a team of people they met with on their journey. "They're academics, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians. But also tattoo masters and navigators and fishermen and elders, artists. As many people as we could we met and we were really lucky to learn from," Julius said. "They shared their knowledge with us and their stories with us. It was really an honor to meet and learn from them. And it really fundamentally changed our filmmakers."
- Disney coordinated closely with the oceanic trusts from various South Pacific islands to ensure that Moana was respectful of ancient Polynesian culture. Story artist David Derrick explained, "This is set in ancient Polynesia, so we had an Oceanic trust from all the various islands to help fact check. To keep us on course. To make sure that we could do everything we could to honor and respect the culture."
- Derrick jumped at the chance to work on a film about Polynesian culture because he wanted to honor his Samoan heritage. He's been in the industry for ten years, but this is his first time working with Disney, and he decided to leave another project in favor of Moana because he wanted to be a part of a film that paid due respect to Polynesian culture. Derrick explained, "I immediately left what I was doing at a different place and came here 'cause it was very personal to me. Polynesia is a world that in general that has been misrepresented in the media. And we went to great lengths." In addition to the research trips conducted by the creative team, Derrick took a research trip of his own with his family and kept a rubbing of an ancestor's gravestone to inspire him throughout the process.
- The story team always works to make sure that the songs serve as narrative motion instead of just musical interludes. "One of the things we always try hard to do is to have songs propel characters and story forward," said screenwriter Jared Bush. "We don't wanna just hit pause on the movie...So as a result of that, we are all beating out the story as if those song moments are dialogue."
- That said, when they received the songs or when Lin-Manuel Miranda would send in lyrics, it was still a very collaborative process. They would go back and forth every week with bi-weekly meetings. Lin would Skype in dressed in his Hamilton garb with a few minutes before he had to hit the stage. Pimentel explained, "There were times when the song would supersede our story. Like it would be so great that the lyrics and the message that Lin would put in his music would be so fantastic that we would actually have to change our storyline just a little bit to focus on what he was doing. So the relationship was pretty amazing."
- The production team was fascinated by the Pacific Islanders' legendary navigation techniques, which allowed them to travel the largest ocean on the planet long before the invention of modern naval tools. Putting it into context, Gooding explained,"Even the Vikings weren't doing anything at the time other than hugging the coast." He explained one of their methods, "One technique they found particularly fascinating was the use of clouds. It turns out that the clouds are a really good indicator of what's below them, color-wise. If you look at the horizon and you see clouds with gray bottoms and gray, gray gray gray, and then you have a section where they have turquoise bottoms, you know right away that there's a lagoon over there and it's reflecting that insanely bright turquoise color up onto the clouds. So they'll head for those turquoise clouds and eventually find land."
- To create Moana's fictional home island of Montunui, the production team drew inspiration from everything they learned on their scouting trips, especially a two-hour consultation on how a village would have been structured 2000 years ago. "There's the pass, which is a break in the reef, very important to get the boat through. And that would have been created by a little fresh water cutting through the reef. There's the point, which kind of signals the entrance to the village," said Andy Harkness, art director of environments and color, "There's the place, which is the village. The river, which is their life source, their fresh water. And the peak, which was really fascinating because to them it's almost an architectural element. It's caused by erosion. But if you're another chief, and you're coming by, and you see this, you know there's a village there, you know that someone very important lives there." To model the island, Harkness sculpted miniature islands and sets out of clay before photographing those models and painting them in Photoshop.
- They even did their due diligence in designing the underworld -- a setting that obviously can't be based on practical locations. Said Gooding, "We talked to everybody there, or I did, anyone I could talk to, to ask them what was their impression of what the underworld would be like. And the only thing that seemed sort of consistent was that it was a beautiful garden. But all the details vary from island to island and individual to individual. What I did is -- this scene actually takes place under the sea, although with air -- I thought, well, what if we use things that grow under the sea but look sort of like plants that you'd find in a garden? Like, tube worms look sort of like coconut trees and so forth. Some coral looks kind of like bushes. The soft corals look like cherry blossom trees and stuff. We played with the scale and made them look more like above-water trees."
- The Oceanic Trust kept Moana's cultural accuracy so on point that an entire crowd scene had to be recreated because, while the costumes were period accurate, they were being used in the wrong context. Gooding recalled, "There was a whole sequence that we completed and we thought we had really done justice to the costumes and we showed it to some people in the story trust and ended up having to redo literally hundreds of crowd costumes cause they said, 'Oh, you'd never go on a boat dressed like that.' The costumes are authentic but just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
- The animation department also faced a fun and unique challenge with the 2D version of Maui, dubbed "Mini-Maui". Embedded within the etched latticework of Maui’s intricate tattoos lives Mini Maui, a silent but very outspoken Jiminy Cricket-eque voice of conscious that keeps Maui in line, and is rendered in graphic 2D animation across Maui’s 3D frame. Eric Goldberg, who worked as lead animator on Genie in Aladdin and co-created 1995’s Pocahontas, explained, “He actually has a personality and a relationship with big Maui. He is, first of all, Maui’s biggest cheerleader and supporter. He is Maui’s alter ego; he can be swaggy and confident too, but more than anything else he’s his conscience.” Golberg worked in tandem with the 3D animation department to keep Mini-Maui consistent with the movements of Maui's athletic frame.
Moana arrives in theaters on November 23rd.