A thread for Disney's MOANA staring Auli'i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda

I learned more about polynesian folklore (esp. Maui, obv) because my daughter likes this movie than I ever would have otherwise, so they did a good job in that regard

I liked the idea of this film when I first heard about it but I probably wasn't going to pay full ticket price for a musical starring The Rock
then I remembered I am a dad and also it's more appropriate to get choked up at these moves with the nuclear fam than when I'm by myself on a long airplane ride

xpost to Jeff you didn't have a 3 yr old during the Age of Frozen, obsession was higher and way worse movie/songs

no way dude Frozen has much better music if we're grading the musical aspec

Free agent guard Derrick Rose will meet with the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday, league sources tell ESPN.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 5, 2017

Blegh wrong thread, mods delete?

woj is welcome here

You're wojcome

Disney may just have seen the situations as analogous ie "hmm maybe we should do better w this 'ethnic studies' sorta stuff"

Yah, this is what I was getting at. Disney deserves credit for all the hard work to set up the cultural trust (and actually listen to what they had to say) for Moana. Also, it's true for obvious reasons that Hawaiians generally identify with Pacific Islanders more than Native Americans (because they are actually Pacific Islanders), but many do feel a kinship with the latter as 'first nations' peoples. I know that for my girlfriend at least (who is part Hawaiian), the events her college organized to bring out Native American groups and facilitate cultural exchange had profound significance for her. So, these aspects of cultural identity are fluid, and that's part of what makes Moana interesting and complicated.

This is generically ok but jemaines song is all time

The music in Frozen is NOT better than the music in Moana, what the hell

Don't really think either matches up to tangled-musically and otherwise.

the music in Frozen IS better than this and I can only remember one song from Tangled

jesus god what has happened to me

Yeah wtf those are both nuts opinions

Jeff OTM, worth watching just for the animated hair.

I was late to the game and finally watched Moana, Tangled, Brave, and Frozen recently. I would rank them Moana (by a lot), Brave, Frozen, Tangled in that order.

I liked Brave a lot. I liked Frozen a lot too but mostly in spite of the music; there’s literally one memorable song in the whole movie.

My friend Dana as Moana for Halloween: https://www.instagram.com/p/BayCKxWhDQz/?taken-by=dananotdana

<3

Idgi

I think Brave was a gorgeous muddle, Tangled tons of fun, Frozen I never need to see again (maybe confirmed by the horrid Coco short) and Moana pretty good.

i watched this with my 4 year old nephew over the holidays and cried. it is great.

this definitely passed the finding dory test, in that my daughter has watched it a zillion times and i still like it

baby Moana is the cutest and I want to snatch her

yeah the little kids are sooooo cute

it’s pretty great

that scene where she’s a chubby lil baby playing with the wave is so <3 <3

that scene enraptured me

also i feel like the metanarrative of the songs is how Lin-Manuel feels about Puerto Rico and it ambushes me with unexpected emotion

yeah otm

rewatching right now :D

the ocean animation makes me soooooo homesick for the beach, i want to jump right in

"you're welcome" is so goddamn annoying. the rock doesn't need a song. or big hair tbf.

we could make a thread for "the part of movies you've seen before where you know it's a great time to get up and pee, but you realize it a little bit too late and then it's too late and you still need to pee"

i love The Rock and “You’re Welcome”

ITT Tombot and VG disagree on a movie

He did well on it tbh but the songs a little annoying alright imo

But still tho jemaine jemaine jemaine

I like Moana a lot but the songs sung by the dudes in it are just all right

I’ll listen to you’re welcome a million times before the dumb crab song.

Hmm my approach saves a lot of time

.......best animated Disney song nom/poll ever been done?

I mean it's the opener from beauty and the beast but still

i like the Jemaine song a lot too

SHIIINAAAY

that'd be a cool ballot poll! maybe open out to songs from animated films or kids' films generally, just to dodge disney exceptionalism and otherwise yknow "somewhere out there" and "pure imagination" are never gonna get polled. otoh i'd need a long-ass ballot for a poll where wizard of oz is dueling with moana so maybe just animated. i guess the one upshot to all-disney is space to throw a vote to eccentric personal faves like "ichabod crane" or some b.s. song no one remembers from the sword in the stone...

I thought about it but all animated seems very wide, all kids impossible to do so, all movies then it's just the tonight quintet

Including live with disney-style animated just for the sake of 'somewhere' and you can't keep a god dog down (bow wow wow wow) but can't see that not causing a scrap tbh

We have threads barring Disney so I'd be all for some exceptionalism just for the sake of a clean poll, essentially

Would nearly consider it a good candidate for one of the write-up ballots

i mean having done all the disney movie polls i can't really try to bash the exceptionalist tendency now. but i did try to (sometimes) mention the other non-disney movies from the same period, just to try and get them back situated in the general history. iiiiii dunno....

Let's see what it looks like in the morning

^ rejected hunchback opener fyi

You’re my best friend, my best friend
And we are family

Gone from Netflix, fuck!

;_;

For those who like Te Vaka / Opetaia Foa'i / Olivia Foa'i as much as I do, I found this rare gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mu5XnpdCgY

It's an extended version of the opening prayer/song which Opetaia extended for another part (reprise?) of the movie but was not included in the final cut. The first minute should sound fairly familiar to those of us who've watched a million times, but around the minute mark is where it turns into something amazing.

John Lassetter asked for me to write a piece to go with the Disney castle logo at the beginning of the movie, and that’s when I wrote “Tulou Tagaloa”. Later on, the directors were playing around with an idea which involved Moana finding the ‘heart of te fiti’, and as they liked ‘Tulou Tagaloa’, they asked me to write an extended piece for it. This piece is the ocean telling Moana, in a nurturing sympathetic tone, of the task that awaits her. ​And once again, my daughter Olivia adds her magic touch to it.

-Opetaia Foa'i

I guess this is my Te Vaka thread now (sorry, not sorry):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszd49

rewatching this movie under the influence of pregnancy hormones is...a lot

My daughter's award-winning theater program at her middle school performed a preview of a semi-secret pilot version of a live musical version of this at the Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta last year, which was pretty much the last thing she did before lockdown.

man this movie rules. there are just a couple jokes/moves i could do without but overall one hell of a story, several amazing songs, and that water is gorgeous.

love it so much! baby moana is such a cutie

Because I have to do it, here's my daughter's theatre program (public school!) at work doing bits of Moana:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uee08PkdX5E

They killed it, but their Maui in particular was great.

That's awesome.

You should send this to Opetaia Foa'i. The language for most of the PI songs is sung in Tokelauan which wiki says there are only 4,260 speakers globally, he would get a kick that people are celebrating his language/culture.

i've been looking for a place to post this animated short... this must be the place

it's "based on the long-hidden history of four healing stones on Waikiki Beach placed there as a tribute to four legendary mahu who first brought the healing arts to Hawaii." insightful into Hawaiian concepts of gender and healing, beautifully rendered.

https://www.kapaemahu.com/

Wow... I'm an ignorant tourist who has passed by those stones many times without paying my respects. Will rectify that on my next visit. Thank you for posting davey.

you bet!

i'm a longtime resident and i didn't know the story either

I think it's currently on Criterion Channel, too, which is cool.

Man, Moana is great and still looks amazing.

Apparently they just surprised announced a sequel, supposedly out November, reportedly repurposed from a TV project? Sounds like a hail Mary/Moana move.

Sequel is cute but a lesser vehicle. Music is meh. Looks great though

Hated it. Music sucked, terrible development of the many new characters, and way too many winks at the audience. felt like a Dreamworks movie. I absolutely love the first one and found it massively disappointing. My 10 and 12 year olds also underwhelmed but the 4 year old loved it.

Watched this for the first time this weekend. My daughter watches the songs all the time but never the movie - it was great by nothing like I was expecting. Was not expecting big fantasy Le Guin style baddie fights.

The new one apparently began as a planned Disney+ series - I don't know how far along things were when it was rejiggered into a movie, but maybe that explains some issues? Have not seen yet, disappointed to hear it's lousy.

i might've been in the wrong frame of mind or had my expectations too high, would be happy if my impression shifts over what are sure to be many more viewings on Disney+ in the next 6-12 months...

it definitely felt like it was a geared towards a younger audience than the first one, esp the whole coconut scene.

def feels like the old Disney straight-to-VHS sequels of the 90s. but i enjoyed myself nonetheless. it's definitely sloppy though, rushed ideas, unearned beats and moments.

I only liked one of the new songs. one of the songs unwittingly sounds like "Rock Me Amadeus"

As mentioned passim I visited Berlin last week, and I kept seeing posters for a new film called Vaiana 2, but it was quite obviously Moana 2 with a different name! Viz:

https://www.cinebonus.fr/images/ff/700/vaiana-67ce64a308.jpg

It's apparently some kind of trademark issue. The internet believes that Disney changed the name because of an Italian porn star, which sounds like the kind of bullshit that Reddit etc passes around as fact, but perhaps it's true after all. In Italy the film was released as Oceania:

https://images.static-bluray.com/movies/covers/174514_large.jpg

I'm going to digress here. I was in Sainsbury's earlier today. There was a song on the tannoy where the chorus was obviously "Need You Tonight" by INXS, but with a woman singing over the top. An interpolation. That's what the kids call it. An interpolation. I remember thinking "but the original song isn't that old", and then it dawned on me that 1987 was thirty-seven years ago.

The song sounded like one of those found-on-Soundcloud / generated-by-an-agency soundalikes that plays in cheaper shops, but according to the internet it's an actual pop single by Dua Lipa! She is an actual real pop star beloved of the BBC etc. I am disappointed with modern pop music.