Disney’s Moana isn’t progressive — it’s dangerous
Imagine a country where the history of your people is told twice: once by your family and community, then again by your school and society. The first version recites the stories of innovative seafarers who developed a complex culture at the edge of the world. The second version — more like a revision — tells of accidental migrants who developed a Stone Age culture in a country meant for better things. For generations of Māori this was more than a thought exercise, it was a reality. There was the Māori account, accorded little weight until now, and the mainstream account where essential parts were derogatory, wrong or both.
You can replace “Māori” with any other Polynesian ethnic group and the paragraph holds. Kānaka maoli, Native Hawaiians, continue to defend the world they live in against the world many white historians and anthropologists describe. In 1938 Ralph Kuykendall, a leading historian of Hawai’i in the 19th century, argued kānaka maoli were slave owners, a historical “fact” few actual kānaka maoli would recognise. Even Gavan Daws, an Australian historian and the author of the leading text on Hawaiian history, Shoal of Time, paints a picture of kānaka maoli as a feudal people who time left behind. Quoting an 1886 Planters Monthly article about how “it is better here that the white man should rule,” Daws notes “the conclusion was inescapable.”
With a track record like this it’s easy to understand why many Polynesians distrust their histories and stories in another people’s hands. In World of Warcraft “mana,” a Polynesian loanword like tattoo and taboo, is the mystical force powering druids and mages and shaman and warlocks. Players measure their mana in points and can replenish their energy with things like “mana biscuits.” Mana becomes something like orenda, the Iroquois name for spiritual power. Yet mana is a loanword few Polynesians would recognise the way gamers use it. In Polynesia mana describes the different forms political power can take, not the hocus pocus gamer culture imagines.
I took my niece and nephew to Moana, Disney’s latest animated adventure film, expecting the same. On the one hand something safe and familiar yet on the other hand something twisted and bent. Is this a story we might recognise? Moana, the Polynesian heroine who restores Te Fiti’s greenstone heart to save her people, looks and even sounds like the Pacific: the crashing waves, the steaming mountains, the whiffs of salt and fire, the heat thick and still. Here’s a heroine we recognise, I thought, a character my niece and nephew can identify with. There’s something to be said for inventing a character rather than appropriating one.
To be fair, my initial suspicions were a defence mechanism. In the artistic imagination the Pacific is see as a either a testing ground for anthropologists, a staging ground for US military operations, an easy setting for romantic escapism or a site for white projections. Arguably this was as true for Paul Gauguin as it is for Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a box-office bomb combining the worst elements of white romanticism and American militarism in Hawai’i. In Cloud Atlas, the film based on David Mitchell’s book of the same name, an imagined version of Māori-on-Moriori slavery acts as a metaphor for the West’s own crimes.
What makes this particular projection and others easy is Polynesian people’s supposed proximity to whiteness. In the 19th and early 20th centuries Polynesians baffled Western racial typologists. Were we “Orientals” or “American Indians?” Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian zoologist and botanist, was convinced our origins were South American, even going as far sailing 7000km from Peru to French Polynesia on a balsa wood raft to prove his hunch. Although science would eventually settle the debate — Polynesians arrived out of Asia — all kinds of theories leaped out of the ocean in the period between first contact and scientific consensus. The “Aryan Māori” theory, one of the more outlandish, held that Māori were descendants of a proto-European “master race.”
What made these theories particularly intriguing for social scientists and amateur enthusiasts was the apparent bifurcation in the Pacific: at one end of the Pacific were the “dusky” Melanesians and on the other were the “noble” and mysterious Polynesians. This supposed racial indeterminacy acted as convenient cover for the theft of Indigenous lands and the exploitation of Indigenous labour. It meant, as the New Zealand historian James Belich sarcastically put it, “the British colonisation of New Zealand was therefore a family reunion.” Polynesians fell a few branches down the family tree of man and, with a helping of Protestant work ethic and English manners, perhaps they might climb again.
Or so the reasoning goes. In some ways the same idea is at work in Moana. Our apparent proximity to whiteness makes us commercially viable yet our obvious otherness makes us exotic enough to sustain a myth. Moana herself is safe enough for white audiences to identify with. One writer even went as far as hailing her as “Disney’s first Jewish princess.” This is where we find the contradiction at the centre of the film: Disney is using Polynesia as a stage and Moana as a prop for resolving its own gender crisis. In the run-up to the film’s release stories appeared in the media applauding Moana as a feminist hero, a kind of “anti-princess.” This is what progress is meant to look like.
“Finally,” I muttered in the cinema, “someone who isn’t going to put up with bloody mansplaining.” “I guess,” my sister added, “it’s just a shame about the whitesplaining.” In other words, for everything Disney gets right in the film, something else goes wrong. As director John Musker admits, Moana “came out of a sort of fantasy of how [Polynesian voyaging] got started again.” The question is still a source of tension and debate among historians and scientists. After settling West Polynesia 3500 years ago, why did long distance voyaging enter an almost 2000-year hiatus? And who broke the hiatus, helping launch the settlement of the three corners of the Polynesian triangle?
“What if it were all because of a 16-year-old girl,” Musker wondered. This would make Moana the founding ancestor of Polynesian peoples, an honour which — in many Polynesian societies — belongs to Māui, the bumbling side-kick in the film. If Polynesian histories and mythologies were in need of feminising this role-reversal might amount to a bite of satisfying irony. What if Māui was, in fact, a woman? Yet this is where the contradiction at the centre of the film emerges again. Disney is using Polynesia as its stage, but displacing actual Polynesian histories and mythologies.
Even as the filmmakers invent a feminist heroine in Moana they simultaneously debase an actually existing feminist heroine in Te Fiti, the so-called lava “witch,” a cinematic rip-off of the fire goddess Pele from kānaka maoli mythology. Even as they depict the finest parts of Polynesian iconography, from the Hawaiian hula to the Māori haka, they transform Maui from cultural hero to American jerk. The filmmakers cut off manageable chunks of exotica, from Samoan pe’a to Tongan vaka, while refusing to keep faith with actual Polynesian histories and mythologies. For every cinematic invention there is a cultural appropriation.
Perhaps this comes with the territory. Think Pocahontas or Lilo and Stitch. Even Frozen, the Disney sensation based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” traces its origins to Sámi culture. Colonising the storytelling landscape of other people is what Disney does. It feels naïve to admit, but there were reasons to think Moana might have been different. Taika Waititi, the director of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, wrote the initial screenplay. The writing and production teams took advice from the Oceanic Story Trust, a special advisory board responsible for ensuring the film’s cultural authenticity. My niece and nephew were thrilled after learning Disney was creating a character who might look and sound like the people they knew.
Yet for all of Moana’s merits as a feminist heroine — as a Polynesian — Moana itself collapses into the same old tired tropes as films like Pocahontas. Think about it this way: the writing team of eight included only one woman. Just as white writers defined the Indigenous experience in Pocahontas, men are writing and defining the latest feminist hero in Moana. This is where the contradiction at the heart of the film emerges again, only this time it does so off-screen. Maybe I’m cynical, but men writing a feminist film seems like a possible act of bad faith, an attempt to capture the zeitgeist rather than genuinely address the gender crisis in children’s storytelling.
Of course, the more things change the more they stay the same. The history of Polynesian literature and cinema is a history of outsiders: American, British and French writers with dreams of virgin beaches and sultry locals. Think of Herman Melville’s Typee or Mark Twain sketch of Hawai’i as “the peacfulest, restfulest, sunniest, balmiest, dreamiest haven of refuge for a worn and weary spirit the surface of the earth can offer.” Robert Louis Stevenson thought much the same about Samoa, his final home, as did Marlon Brando of his private island in French Polynesia. Teti’aroa was “more gorgeous than anything I had anticipated,” he marvelled in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me.
In some ways the Pacific 19th century travel writers and 20th century celebrities describe is a Pacific I recognise. But in most ways it is not. So far as Polynesia exists in the Western imagination it seems to exists as a space for white renewal. Twain’s “haven of refuge for a worn and weary spirit.” Stevenson’s escape from poor health. Brando’s escape from Hollywood. Disney even runs its own mega-resort “inspired by the natural wonders and rich traditions of Hawai‘i.” Perhaps this is another reason Moana works as a stage for Disney to resolve its own gender crisis. Just as Polynesian peoples are victims of white projections, so too is Polynesia the place.
In most circumstances this might amount to harmless fun — simple escapism — but Disney is the world’s second-largest media conglomerate. As far as Moana is concerned it is no longer a question of accurate representation but of power. Disney has the power to shape how the world understands Polynesians and Polynesia. What the world will know of Māui, the blustering deuteragonist in the film but the culture hero in Polynesian mythology, is a punchline. There is a danger Disney’s take on Māui will displace actual Polynesian stories. Where is the line between cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism?
Then again, the question seems like a misdirection. As Musker explained Moana was always an act of projection, one man’s answer to the supposed revival in Polynesian voyaging (never mind the fact Polynesian voyaging never actually stopped in the way Musker portrays it). In the final analysis a focus on accurate representation, cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism might risk missing the point. After all, my niece and nephew love Moana the character: “I’m not a princess,” she growls at Maui, a strangely affirming denial. Yet for all of her merits the proper question is whether Moana the film has “mana”, loosely meaning “integrity” in this context. For displacing actual Polynesian histories and mythologies, the answer is no.
— — — — —
Post-script: the Moana syllabus
For a further critiques and discussion, join the community at Mana Moana: We Are Moana, We Are Maui.
For a thoughtful essay on why we should give the film a chance — and what it contributes to Polynesians — check out Patrick Thomsen’s review at E-Tangata.
For further analysis on the intriguing idea of Polynesian’s proximity to whiteness follow the link in paragraph 6 to Maile Arvin’s work or check out this publication list.
