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Moana is a computer-animated musical fantasy comedy adventure film about a young Pacific Island princess who dreams of becoming an ocean navigator.
It has been criticised for perpetuating stereotypes of Polynesians by depicting Maui as overweight.
One of the movie’s directors, John Musker, said music had to play a big part in the movie to really capture the culture.
“I mean, we were hearing music all the way through the islands.”
“You know, we, when we visit the islands, of course since the islands have been churches have come down, there’s a church every two blocks. ”
“And so there’s music in all these different denominations. There’s the Catholic church and the Protestant church and this church and the Mahdi church.”
Musker says music is a part of the islands. People “sing songs of farewell, sing songs, work songs and all that. So we just felt like and it’s such a rich, man, we heard songs before we went too.”
The movie will be titled Vaiana in many countries following a trademark conflict. It will be titled Oceania in Italy, while the name of the protagonist will be Vaiana in lieu of Moana, presumably to avoid confusion with an Italian porn star of the same name, Moana Pozzi.
In addition to accusations of stereotyping, a costume made to tie in with the film was pulled by Disney from its online store following complaints about it being culturally insensitive.
The problematic Halloween costume is a bodysuit that gives kids brown tattooed skin like Maui’s. It was met with a firestorm of online criticism shortly after it was made available at Disney stores.
Disney pulled the costumes and released the following statement:
“The team behind “Moana’ has taken great care to respect the cultures of the Pacific Islands that inspired the film, and we regret that the Maui costume has offended some.”
“We sincerely apologize and are pulling the costume from our website and stores.”
Moana is due for release in on 23 November.
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