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I was so excited to be in the same room and have the honor of interviewing the directors (and now Golden Globe Nominees) of Moana, Ron Clements & John Musker last month in LA while attending the Moana red carpet event. They have worked together at Walt Disney Animation for 40 years now and have created 2 of my top 3 all time favorite Disney movies (Aladdin and Little Mermaid). All in all, they have created some of the best Disney classics, including The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, The Princess and the Frog and now Moana.
We asked them about the challenges they face being that this was their first primarily computer animated film.
RON : Some things are the same in terms of the script and the storyboarding and the voice actors. I mean that, that really isn’t different. But the actual production process, is quite a bit different. We had to actually have tutorials before the movie even started.
JOHN : Yeah, Steve Goldberg worked on Pros and gave us a tutorial and said these jobs don’t exist in CG. These do exist and it’s a whole different thing and one of the big things is in hand-drawn you can get going a lot quicker. You know, you have a piece of paper, you got a pencil, you can start exploring the characters. In CG they’ve got to build the characters, literally sort of create them in three-dimensional space. They’ve got to rig them which means they’ll put all the armature in there so they can move around. They got to create the world they work in. So, it’s a longer set of time.
“It’s very complicated. There’s so many different stages.”
We were also very curious about their passion and directions in the stories they chose to tell, we asked, “you guys have directed three out of the now five movies of princesses of color for the Disney film franchise. What steps did you take to like respect the culture but yet share it?”
RON : Well, the big thing was we did a huge research five years ago when we first pitched the movie. We spent like three weeks in Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti. We met with cultural ambassadors, linguists, anthropologists, Sailors and chiefs. We really try to connect with the culture and learn how proud they were of their background as the greatest navigators the world has ever seen.
We heard this expression in Tahiti, know your mountain. And your mountain is essentially everything that led up to you, all the people that led up to you, everything that happened, all of the things that if they didn’t exist, you wouldn’t exist. And, and they said if you don’t know your mountain you really don’t know who you are.
“If you don’t know your mountain
you really don’t know who you are”
During our interview, we learned a lot of really fun facts about the process and making of Moana. One was, the movie was originally going to be centered around Maui and that he was going to be bald!!!
JOHN : I was intrigued with the Pacific islands and then that led me to read Polynesian mythology. I read about this guy Mali who was unbelievable. He was a shapeshifter and had a magical fishhook. He could pull up islands, had tattoos, a superhero. And I was like why has this never been done in a movie before?
JOHN : And it was even kind of called the Mighty Maui actually, was sort of the original title. Then John’s like you got to do research.
You got to go to the islands. When we went there and we heard about navigation and all this and it was really Ron’s idea, what if we have a character called Moana, which means ocean and we built it around her, someone who wants to be a navigator like her ancestors. And Mali we sort of saw as a true grit type story where she really is this determined, forceful individual and she teams up with kind of a washed up, you know, some down on his luck–.
JOHN : But she’s the focus of the story and so it was a challenge when we were making the movie always to keep her at the center. Sometimes Maui, he’s kind of like a magic character, he could start to rise up and we said no, no, this has got to be in the service of her story. So we– and our producer was very strong in terms of keep the focus on Moana when Mali threatened to take over sometimes.
RON : We thought of a hero’s journey for Moana. She, has to– she’s on a quest to save her people. She faces numerous obstacles. She’s resilient. She’s also empathetic, which is an important part of who she is and, and fearless and that she really finally proves herself and becomes the person that she’s meant to be.
Something that is new to me, and I have enjoyed very much going back and watching old Disney movies are the “Easter egg” those tributes to characters past that make appearances in other Disney movies! I was able to spot a few….
Squirt from Finding Nemo was pretty easy as well as Sven, from Frozen. They also told us to keep an eye out for Baymax from Baymax, Flounder from The Little Mermaid, Flash from Zootopia, Olaf from Frozen, Aladdin’s Lamp, Sebastian from The Little Mermaid.
Another thing that I wasn’t aware of, it they put a little teaser for the next upcoming Disney movie…. Next on Disney’s list is Wreck it Ralph 2, so look for Ralph at the very end in the credits
To top of the exciting news, Lin Manuel Mirandas “How Far I’ll Go” was also nominated for Best Original Song at this year’s Golden Globes. Congratulations to all!
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