Review of Moana

As with Frozen, I think I'm not the target market for this Disney film, but I wanted to catch up on it. There was lots to like. The visuals, especially the tattoos and the animated tattoos on the Maui character, really look Polynesian, rather in the way that Frozen acknowledges the Sami visual culture. It's thoroughly pagan, with no concessions to a Christian world-view. There aren't any redeeming white people - it's just a Polynesian story. The heroine is a little girl, and one of the other significant characters is her grandmother. But it's not hard to see why it isn't a Disney classic. The songs are mainly not great, and the sidekick animals - a pig and a chicken - are not good enough to inspire affection or humour. Which is a shame, because there's a lot to like. I loved the depiction of the outrigger canoes, especially the big ocean-going ones that make an appearance at the end. And the way that Moana learns to do the Polynesian hand navigation theme is great, and represents part of the film's homage to the navigational feats of the Polynesians. 

One thing I didn't like, though, was the implicit message of the ending - that it's important not to be confined by the ecological constraints of your island. There's a song early on that says 'The Island Gives Us Everything We Need', but it turns out to be wrong - the answer to the ecological crisis that besets the islanders turns out to be partly magical, but also involves learning to voyage beyond the island again, as the ancestors did. Which is a nice anti-colonial message, but not a good one in terms of recognising ecological limits and learning to live within them. I can't help thinking of the nutjobs in California who think that Elon Musk's private rocket program is the 'answer' to climate change.

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