Moana is a story of a young girl who will do whatever it takes to save her people. Her journey across the ocean, led her to face adversity and many obstacles, but Moana overcame them all to do what she set out to. The movie has been one of Disney’s most popular films in the last decade. Yet the movie represented a lot more than just a girl on a mission. It represents a whole culture; the culture of the Pacific Island.

For Disney there was a lot of pressure to get this film right. From Mulan to Pocahonstas too often Disney’s representation of other cultures were insensitive and downright offensive. With Moana they made a real effort to change that, including the creation of an advisory board called the Oceanic Trust. That group helped create a more accurate representation of their culture. 

Through it all Disney did a quality job of accurately portraying the culture of Pacific Islanders in particular with the focus on their tradition of exploration as well as traditions that have been passed down. However, there were criticisms that the movie received, proving that there is still plenty of room for improvement about how Pacific Islands and the people who live there are portrayed by Western Culture.

One of the most successful aspects of Moana is the portrayal of the Islanders as voyagers and people who spent significant time on the ocean. Exploration was something that was an integral part of Polynesian culture and they were some of the best navigators in the world — using the slightest natural details to help direct them.

Yet, the idea that people of the Pacific Islands were explorers goes in stark contrast to how western culture wrote and described Pacific Islanders. Captain Cook and his men wrote about the Pacific Islanders as people who had no knowledge about any world outside of their own. “Cook himself Cook himself implies that before he arrived in Hawaiʻi, Kānaka believed they lived alone in a watery world” (Chang 6). 

However, Cook was not the only one to reinforce it, the idea was widely accepted within Western Culture including in a Hawaiian history textbook that said, “‘Hawaiians lived for hundreds of years isolated from the rest of the world,’ they ‘knew nothing of events in Europe or the Americas or Asia, or even on the other Polynesian islands in the Pacific from which they had come’”(6).

This idea was reinforced and widely accepted and yet it is inaccurate. That is why it is so valuable for Moana to correct this century old inaccuracy. Not only is it not well known that Pacific Islanders were voyagers and excellent navigators, it is also one of the most impressive parts of their culture. By putting the idea on display as a central theme in the movie, Disney and Moana help convince Americans that exploration and voyaging is an essential part of Islanders’ culture. 

One part of the movie that highlights the history of voyaging by the Pacific Islanders is the song “We Know the Way.” The song begins with Moana discovering that her ancestors sailed the seas and were voyagers. Then, in one of the most beautiful displays of animation, viewers see her ancestors sailing the ocean in traditional boats that the Islanders used. These images are powerful because they show a more accurate depiction of the history of Pacific Islanders and their journey across the Pacific.

The meaning of “We Know the Way is also impactful. The beginning of the song is in a foreign language believed to be in the Tokelauan language (Brayson). The second half of the song reverts back to English and describes the process of navigating the Pacific Ocean using the wind, sea and the sky as tools. This was exactly how Pacific Islanders navigate the ocean and the words along with the amazing animations prove how impressive it was.

Later in the movie, the demigod Maui teaches Moana how to navigate the ocean in the exact same way as described in the song. Maui’s teaching helped give a better understanding into how Pacific Islanders were successfully able to cross the Pacific without any of the technology that is available today. 

Both the song and the scene where Maui teaches Moana how to navigate the sea, “pays tribute to long-distance canoe voyaging and traditional navigational knowledge that is still used today throughout the Pacific” (Ketekiri). Those two moments show major progress for western culture’s accuracy in telling of Pacific Islander’s history and it is one of the most celebrated parts of the movie.

Disney also successfully starts the movie with a pretty accurate insight into islander culture. In the first scene, Moana and the other young children are hearing a story from her grandmother about the story of Maui. This was a powerful representation because it shows viewers a glimpse of Islander culture and the tradition of passing down stories.

That is a complete change from past work on the Pacific Islands where their traditions were often misrepresented. Since the discovery of the Pacific and the Islands that are there, Western culture has viewed the “Oceanic [culture] as savage, lascivious, and barbaric has had a lasting and negative effect on people's views of their history and traditions” (149).

This was not only something that Disney needed to avoid but also a view they needed to correct. As one of the only mainstream films on the Pacific Island it was imperative that Disney shift away from this view and accurately portray the Pacific Islanders as who they were. The opening story does an excellent job of that. Portraying not only the tradition of storytelling but also explaining some of their ways of life. It is these stories and this portrayal of their way of life in the first moments of the movie and in the scenes that followed that help paint a more accurate picture of what Pacific Islander culture was like. Most importantly it gives Western society who are just scraping the surface of the culture and history of the Pacific Island, a more accurate story to believe.

While this scene and the traditions that Moana conveys to the audience certainly creates encouragement, the representation of Maui is something that does not accurately portray what all natives of the Pacific Islands believe. The idea behind Maui was for the character to look like the grandfather of the Rock. Yet the portrayal offended a lot of natives with Pacific Island ancestry. Their belief of Maui is a “teenager on the verge of manhood” (Herman), not the massive human being that Maui appears like in the movie. In fact many natives of Pacific Islands find the representation offensive because it reinforces the idea that Polynesian men are overweight (Herman).

That may not have been the intention of Disney and the movie makers but that has been a criticism that has consensus. Disney may have been well intentioned in trying to represent the Rock and his Polynesian ancestry, but by doing so they overlook the majority of Polynesians who so rarely see themselves on the big screen. By being one of the few motion pictures to focus on the Pacific and more specifically the Pacific Islands it was imperative that Disney tried their best to represent the majority of Polynesians. The representation of Maui failed to do that.

Part of the criticism of Maui also comes from the fact that different Polynesian cultures have different views of the demigod. That brings up another issue with the film, despite Disney’s best intention to try and include all of Polynesia, it can also offend people because certain aspects of the film may not represent their culture as strongly as it does another. This concern occurs because of the lack of media on Pacific Island culture. If Moana was not one of the very few films that attempt to accurately portray the culture then it would be possible for Disney to focus specifically on one island and its own culture instead of clumping all the islands into one.

The lack of films also forces many Americans to rely on Moana to teach them about Pacific Island culture in its entirety. This is impossible because a two hour movie is incapable of teaching people everything they should know about the culture in the Pacific Islands. This is precisely why there is a need for more mainstream films to be done on the Pacific Islands and more importantly accurately portray the Pacific Islands and the culture. The burden of representing all of the Pacific and being the main source of information for many Americans is a burden that Moana should not have to carry.

Disney’s movie Moana is a step in the right direction as western culture looks to move to a place where Pacific Islands and the natives that live there are portrayed accurately. That has traditionally not been the case. From the journals of the Europeans who discovered the Pacific Islands to movies such as South Pacific (1958) and The Thin Red Line (1998), the Pacific, the islands and the people have often been misrepresented. Moana is a clear improvement from those descriptions of Pacific Island culture.

Yet, it does not diminish the need for even more progress and an increase in mainstream media that focuses on the Pacific Island culture. One movie is incapable of gaining the approval of all Polynesian people especially when there are many different sects of Polynesia. There is plenty of work left to be done; hopefully Moana is just one of the earliest steps in that direction.

Work Cited

Chang, David A. The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 

“Exploring Our Fluid Earth.” Wayfinding and Navigation | Manoa.hawaii.edu/ExploringOurFluidEarth, manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/navigation-and-transportation/wayfinding-and-navigation.

Hau'ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 6, no. 1, 1994, pp. 148–161. 

Herman, Doug. “How the Story of ‘Moana’ and Maui Holds Up Against Cultural Truths.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 2 Dec. 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-story-moana-and-maui-holds-against-cultural-truths-180961258/

Ketekiri Tamaira, A. M. "Beyond Paradise? Retelling Pacific Stories in Disney's Moana." Contemporary Pacific, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 297-327,574. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/scholarly-journals/beyond-paradise-retelling-pacific-stories-disneys/docview/2085072886/se-2?accountid=14749.