When Disney retroactively marked out the “Princess” brand in the early 2000s, it was undoubtedly thinking in terms of merchandising dollars. Yet this cynical and highly gendered marketing ploy also exposed the mustiness of the Princess Film subgenre. With Mulan as its reference point, Walt Disney Animation Studios was eventually spurred to utilize the well-worn formula in fresh and gently subversive ways with The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen (plus Brave, from cousin studio Pixar).
Disney Animation’s latest feature is Moana, an archetypal Princess Film in almost every respect, right down to the heroine’s obligatory “yearning song.” Like Tangled, it’s lightly self-aware, and like Brave it ditches romance for derring-do. Moana (newcomer Auli’I Cravalho) is next in line for the chieftainship of her people’s island, but she dreams of exploring beyond the forbidden reefs that mark the limits of her world. Naturally, a supernatural crisis eventually pushes her out the door at the helm of a catamaran, sailing towards the voluble, arrogant demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), who Moana must strong-arm into atoning for his sins against Nature.
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Much of Moana is cookie-cutter Disney filmmaking, despite the mythical Polynesian setting: a couple of comic sidekicks, lively but unremarkable songs, and an inevitable friendship-rift-reconciliation cycle for Moana and Maui. Still, the aforementioned setting counts for a lot. Moana thrives on production designer Ian Gooding’s fantastic vision of fairy tale Oceania, explored through a sort of mini-Odyssey. (The coconut-wearing goblin pirates called Kakamora are a particular highlight.) Yet the film also finds the space for a serving of shrewd historical allegory, for Moana rather unexpectedly functions as a parable about the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific. This elevates Disney’s latest comforting confection into something unexpectedly nifty and novel: a Princess Film for social studies geeks and Civilization fanatics.
Moana opens Wednesday, November 23 in wide release.
