Trailer
Plot summary
Motunui's people worship Te Fiti, the goddess of nature, a living island whose heart is a pounamu stone. Maui, a demigod who shifts shape and commands wind and sea, stole that heart so humanity would hold the power of creation, and Te Fiti broke apart. He lost the heart and his fish hook to the sea. A thousand years pass, and the ocean marks Moana, chief Tui's daughter, as the one to take the heart back. Her parents steer her from the water while they prepare her to lead. Blight then kills the plants and thins the fish, and Tui refuses to let her sail past the reef. Her grandmother Tala opens a hidden cave of canoes and tells her the islanders once voyaged, until the missing heart made the ocean unsafe. She hands Moana the heart.
Cast
- Louise Bushas Toddler Moana (voice)
- Puanani Cravalhoas Villager #2 (voice)
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Moana (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Over the five years it took to make Moana, directors John Musker and Ron Clements recruited experts from across the South Pacific into an Oceanic Story Trust, which consulted on cultural accuracy as the story went through nine versions. The Trust objected to a bald Maui, so he was redesigned with long hair, and a scene of Moana throwing a tantrum with coconuts was scrapped.
- After auditions of hundreds of candidates from across the Pacific, 14-year-old high school freshman Auliʻi Cravalho was cast as Moana. Her resemblance to the character was a coincidence: Moana's face and personality had already been designed before she won the part.
- Taika Waititi wrote the first draft of Moana's screenplay, then left Disney in 2012 and went home to New Zealand to focus on his newborn first child and What We Do in the Shadows. He later joked that all that was left of his draft was "EXT: OCEAN - DAY".
- Disney pulled a Maui "skin suit" costume, sold as a tie-in to the film, from its online store after complaints that it was culturally insensitive and appeared to promote brownface.
- On October 25, 2016, it was announced in Papeete that Moana would be the first motion picture fully dubbed in the Tahitian language, following Disney's Zulu dub of The Lion King. That Tahitian version was made available in schools and institutions but never sold to the public.
- Eric Goldberg animated Maui's sentient tattoos by hand, and in the final cut they are the only hand-drawn element of the film; early tests for a fully hand-drawn version of Moana were abandoned.
- Moana was made in makeshift quarters in a giant warehouse in North Hollywood, alongside Zootopia, while Disney Animation's Burbank headquarters was being renovated. Musker noted the same thing happened with The Little Mermaid, made in a warehouse in Glendale.
- In many European countries the title character's name was changed from Moana to Vaiana because of a trademark conflict, and the film's title was changed to match.
