The original Moana could not have arrived in cinemas at a more inopportune time. A movie about a Disney princess – weren’t they supposed to be lovelorn, male-fawning, insipid types? – who isn’t even vaguely intrigued by romantic attachments, boasts a perfectly normal body type and ultimately emerges as a leader of her ancient Polynesian people, it was released in cinemas just as Donald Trump’s presidency began in 2016, with all its inherent implications of a shift in the zeitgeist towards knuckle-headed, white supremacist, women-hating conservatism.
As a cultural marker in the sands of time, this one was up there for its gorgeous failure to mirror shifting societal winds with Blade Runner’s anti-corporate vision of post-human slavery in the dystopian future landing at the height of Reaganomics. And yet, there was something very welcome about this unorthodox tale of a brave, open-hearted young woman and her demigod comrade, who vacillates between cheery narcissism and the apologetic demeanour of one who realises they have failed themselves, their people, and ultimately decent blokedom everywhere.
Just because a cultural moment arrives at a point in time when it seems to be in rampant opposition to the way society is moving, doesn’t mean it lacks the gusto to stand up and be counted. And so, as we are on the precipice of a second Trump presidency, maybe, just maybe, this is exactly the right time for Moana 2 to erupt from the Disney machine which has somehow become the bete noire of the American right wing, and stick two fingers up to those who would like the mouse house to return to the kind of old-fashioned stories that the animated studio was forced to abandon due to lack of popularity in the 1990s.
In an ever-more polarised era, when Disney is being sued by Gina Carano (with Elon Musk’s financial backing) for firing her from The Mandalorian, perhaps what we really need right now is the return of Moana, a film that would never have been considered for release before the studio’s seismic shift away from all-American, Eurocentric family values some time in the late 1990s. According to the Hollywood trades this week, Dwayne Johnson is in talks to return as Maui, the shapeshifting demigod of the south Pacific, as is Auliʻi Cravalho for the role of the titular hero of the piece.
Moana 2, which looks like it will actually be called this, was originally conceived as a TV series. It is now being fast-tracked for a November release as a feature after studio head Bob Iger and his execs liked what they saw in the editing room. The announcement does not affect the development of a previously mooted live action Moana movie, for which Cravalho will not be returning, which is still due to hit multiplexes some time next year.
For those naysayers who still frown upon Disney, let us remind ourselves that this was once the company that depicted Native Americans as savage, pidgin English-speaking subhumans who are hunted like animals by the lost boys in 1953’s Peter Pan; gave us the slave-like half African American, half donkey Sunflower in 1940’s Fantasia; and delivered Sebastian the lazy cod-Caribbean crab (who sings about the joys of unemployment away from the terrifying human world above the waves and might as well be smoking a giant sea-spliff) in 1989’s The Little Mermaid. The studo has probably spent most of the intervening decades making up for such misfires. And why? Because liberal Hollywood got caught up on the wrong side of the culture wars? Or because society itself struggled with movies for kids that spent most of their time reinforcing sexual and cultural stereotypes?
We may only be able to get a true picture of Moana’s place in the pantheon in a few decades’ time, when the US and the wider west have either continued their slow and bumpy march towards a future of tolerance and understanding, or have devolved into a Handmaid’s Tale-like fascist authoritarian dystopia in which Trump and his progeny have restored society to a 1950s-like state of rigid, conservative stereotyping. Where a man is a man, a woman is a woman, everyone on screen is white and Christian, and there is probably no place at all for a young woman of colour and her right-hand god-king sweeping across the pre-industrialised, plastic-free Pacific, without the merest glimpse of a colonial type in sight.
