Liren Xue
Professor Kirsten Gregory
LIT4333
Moana (2016)
The piece that I chose for my Individual Text Feature
is Disney’s newest feature film, Moana. The story draws inspiration from the
oral storytelling traditions held by many Pacific Islander cultures and
combines it with Disney magic and the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda to create a masterpiece
that is enjoyable to viewers of all ages. However, despite being by Disney, the
plot itself feels most directly tied with adolescence since it covers several
common adolescent themes such as discovering one’s identity, leaving home for
the first time, and schisms between the beliefs of parents and their children.
The story begins with a legend, narrated by Moana’s
grandmother, about the mythical figure Maui. He is described as trickster demigod,
with the power of shapeshifting through the magic imbued within his giant
fishhook, intent on stealing from Te Fiti, the goddess responsible for the
creation of islands and the lifeforms that reside on them. Maui’s target is a
stone dubbed the “Heart of Te Fiti” which contains the aforementioned power of
creation, and his intention is to give the stone to humans as a gift. However, after
successfully stealing the heart, he is struck down while trying to escape by a
lava demon called Te Kā. Maui, his fishhook, and the Heart of Te Fiti are then
lost in the sea.
The story then returns to the present—to Moana’s
island—and shows Moana as a toddler listening to her grandmother’s story with a
group of similarly aged children. The other children are frightened by the
story and begin to cry, but Moana is inspired and uses the distraction caused
by the other children to sneak off to the beach. There, the Ocean, who is anthropomorphized
throughout the movie, chooses Moana as its herald and bestows upon her Te Fiti’s
Heart. However, she drops it when her father, who is the island chief and terrified
of the open ocean, finds her by the water.
Then, through a musical montage, the story skips
forward several years to when Moana is a teenager. Through the montage, it is
established that Moana has a strong desire to leave the island and explore the
ocean, but her father is against it and expects her to assume his position as
the village chief after his death. The montage ends with Moana beginning to take
on some responsibilities as a chief-in-training. This is when the story’s
overarching problem is introduced: a villager reports that several of the
island’s coconut groves have begun to wither and that the fishermen of the island
can no longer find fish. Moana’s father insists that the island has always
provided for them and will continue to do so, but Moana believes that it may be
time for the tribe to expand. In a scene common to adolescent works, Moana and
her father argue, and Moana goes off to sea against her father’s wishes. Unfortunately,
the expedition goes horribly wrong, and she crashes and barely survives before even
leaving the surrounding reef. She is found and it is revealed by her mother
that Moana’s father, in his youth, had been just like her, but his brashness
and desire to leave the island led to his best friend drowning. This reveal, alongside
her personal failure, causes Moana to silence her own desires and acquiesce to
her father’s commands.
Later, Moana is shown a secret cave by her
grandmother. Inside, Moana discovers that her ancestors, far from being stuck
on one island, were actually voyagers who journeyed across the sea. She also
finds several of the boats that her ancestors traveled upon. This discovery
coincides with more news about the crop failures on the island and causes Moana
to again challenge her father directly about staying on the island. However, before
the argument can escalate, another villager brings the news that Moana’s
grandmother is dying. Moana and her father rush to her grandmother’s side, and
while her father is speaking with the village doctor, the grandmother tells
Moana that the reason that the seas have become increasingly dangerous and that
the crops have begun to fail is the disappearance of the Heart of Te Fiti. She then
reveals that she was watching years ago when Moana received the Heart from the
ocean and that she’d picked it up after Moana had dropped it. Then, she tells
Moana that she must set sail to find Maui and return Te Fiti’s heart. Moana’s
grandmother then dies.
While the villagers are distraught with the news of the
death, Moana leaves. The rest of the movie follows her journey as she tries to
find Maui, becomes confident in her own abilities, and delivers the Heart back
to Te Fiti.
The reason I chose this movie is
because of the interactions between Moana and her father. Although Disney
reverses the expected positions held by the parent and child, a large cause of
conflict between the two is a disagreement over religion. Namely, Moana
believes that the source of the island’s problems is the disappearance of the
Heart of Te Fiti while her father believes that there must be a logical
explanation. This mirrors the struggle that many adolescents feel in societies
(e.g. the United States) founded on religious principles but are headed toward
secularism. Beyond the religious aspect though, the conflict can be viewed from
a less specific lens and highlights the difficulties that adolescents have when
trying to establish their identities in a world that is vastly different from the
one in which their parents were raised. This is a common problems for
adolescents and, as a result, is reflected in many forms of adolescent media—the
crotchety old person who is nostalgic about the past and disdainful of the music/interests/fashion/slang/etc
of their successors is a widespread trope. For my project, Moana will be the
lens under which this adolescent problem is inspected and the primary focus
will be one of those two themes: conflicts between adolescents and their
parents over general worldviews or the development of adolescent identity despite
the scrutiny and protests of their elders.
Hello Liren,
ReplyDeleteMy gut feeling is that the second theme of rebellion against elders is just far too broad for a paper topic, unless you found a way to make it specific to Pacific Island adolescent or Island Girl figures, etc. The religious/spirituality approach is more specific and might give you more to work with. As you start researching that topic, you may want to begin by researching contemporary cultural patterns of spirituality in the West, and specifically in Pacific Island cultures. For instance, the most common narrative today is that of youth leaving the churches of their parents and identifying as "nones," but Moana reverse that. In Moana, the youth wants to tap into the spirituality of her ancestors, so is there a contemporary or historical precedent of that? In indigenous island cultures, has there been a youthful return to religion or is this a largely imagined trope. If it is at odds with the actual patterns, why would Disney make that approach? You will also want to do some research into representations of island and indigenous cultures in adolescent media and you will want to find out if this is an authentic representation of pacific island creation myths. Finally, you will want to look into scholarship on representations of spirituality in adolescent texts. Sarah Smedman has an article in the CHLA quarterly titled "Spirituality in YA Literature: The Last Taboo,"and Lisa Simon has an article titled "A Mighty River: Intersections of Spiritualities and Activism in Children's and YA Literature." The latter could be of use because the Moana creation myth is also an ecoconscious narrative.
Hello Liren,
ReplyDeleteI do agree that the scope of this paper is way too broad. I think looking at this through a cultural identity lens will be both easier and more interesting to apply sources to. I found this thesis that you could glance over and find more sources in that has to do with Pacificx identities in film: chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/3726/thesis.pdf?sequence=2. And maybe you could refer back to the chapter on Liminality in KCL, as well as “Storying Their Lives” by Wellik and Kazemek, and "Bitter sweet: indigenous women in the Pacific” by Herda, Jones, and Suaalii.
Hi Liren!
ReplyDeleteI have not actually seen Moana yet, but I have seen Pacific Islander movies and I can see how the stereotypes have emerged in those and how they seem to in this Disney film. I think that would definitely be an interesting approach for your paper especially since Disney tries to incorporate culture into their films but sometimes to a fault. It also seems that this could be a similar discussion as with Mango Street since Moana struggles to identify herself outside of her culture (from what it sounds like). I agree that a cultural identity lens would work well with this film. I found a text that does not speak about Moana specifically as it is a relatively new film, but it does highlight the racial representations in Disney films if you were interested in making that comparison. It is called "From the Advent of Multiculturalism to the Elision of Race: The Representation of Race Relations in Disney Animated Features (1995-2009)" by Eve Benhamou.