The Transing of Moana

Moana was first a boy, but nothing in Moana 2 (call it a Disney trans blockbuster) equals the beauty of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 documentary Moana, in which the eponymous native Samoan kid lies in the shallow surf, looking up at his beloved Fa’angase as she eats little fish and basks in his teenage adoration. It’s one of those peerless moments associated with Flaherty, the anthropologist-poet best known for directing the 1922 Eskimo classic Nanook of the North. Flaherty always found beauty in the commonplace activities of little-known cultures. (Man of Aran and Louisiana Story are his other masterpieces.)

Almost a century later, Disney has submitted Flaherty’s archetypal doc to gender transition in its cartoon story of a girl named Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) who saves her South Seas island people from ecological disaster and, on her divinely inspired path, repeatedly restores their historical mythology.

This follow-up to the 2016 Moana continues the Disney brand’s dedication to DIE (Diversity Inclusion Equity), indoctrinating young movie-watchers to gender and race obsession. Now we know that Disney is in the business of teaching, not entertainment, and the company struck gold when the first Moana transformed Flaherty’s artistic breakthrough from cultural anthropology into feminist score-settling.

Changing Moana from a boy to a girl is a way of separating the sexes and setting them against each other, using “equity” as the basis of an ideological challenge. Flaherty emphasized the rituals that precede a pubescent boy’s manhood — hunting, survival skills, and an elaborately detailed tattooing ceremony. Disney arrogates those traits, skills, and experiences, essentially using modern female ideals to challenge traditional masculine ideals. Unlike the boy Moana, girl Moana must go beyond the reef that surrounds her island community, fight mythological monster-gods, and, once again, discover the Oprah message: who she is meant to be as a “wayfinder.” (“Don’t call her ‘princess,’” cautions the Hollywood Reporter. Disney is anti-monarchist until Meghan Markle gets a production deal.)

What Disney’s ideological competition gains in feminist narcissism it loses in social knowledge and depth of feeling. The Moana franchise falsifies the history of how Samoan culture sustained itself over centuries. “We are voyagers!” Moana exclaimed belatedly in the first cartoon. (Now she explores with a sister-partner, Simea, voiced by Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda.) But the Disney transformation is cartoonish in more than one way: We lose the photographic values of nature, now cheapened through super-colorful digital animation, especially in Moana 2’s high-rising ocean waves during some splashy sea exploits. Flaherty scrupulously captured animal, water, and flora phenomena (Moana wrestling with a man-size tortoise and his brother Pe’a climbing the daunting heights of an arching coconut tree).

Already an enormous box-office success, Moana 2 unfortunately confirms the social impact of Disney’s faux anthropology. Its animation patronizes the third world via DIE dictates, same as with the endless iterations of The Lion King, but this cartoon exoticism is just a new form of the blatant colonialism that Claude Lévi-Strauss lamented in his 1958 memoir Tristes Tropiques. The trials of Moana and Simea are never as enlightening or insightful as the “great event” that Flaherty captured — Moana’s tattoo ritual, a passage into manhood, which Flaherty introduced with this title card:

This pattern of the flesh, to you perhaps no more than cruel, useless ornament, is how the Samoan wins the dignity, the character and fibre which keeps his race alive.

Flaherty’s sophistication has been replaced with Millennial race consciousness (i.e., racism justified by craven millionaire Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson again voicing the demigod Maui). Moana 2 certifies that we’ve grown accustomed to trite neo-anthropology. It’s like The Life of Pi but for girls. Moana 2 exchanges the documentarian respect of Flaherty for phony respect. The result is ersatz musical numbers and an animation process that tricks-up the anthropomorphic style of animal behavior and turns humans into pets, overbearingly cute “people of color” — the only time that demeaning media cliché is acceptable.