‘Humanity rising from the depths of brine’: an oceanic politics in Disney’s Moana

Abstract

Disney’s Moana (2016) portrays a village leader’s daughter who leaves her home island and sails across the open ocean to undo a curse spreading across Polynesia in response to a Promethean blunder by the demigod Maui. The film’s popular reception focuses on its representation of Polynesian culture, often placing an emphasis on the corporate history and practices of the Walt Disney Company. This essay instead pursues an ecocritical interrogation of the film. While Disney is perhaps inescapably complicit in economies of ecological destruction and exploitation, the production, aesthetics and narrative of Moana nonetheless offer a critical impulse through what I read as an ecopolitical attentiveness to the natural world. On the level of production, the management of computational capacity and the techniques used in the elaborate rendering of the ocean reflect an acknowledgement both of the complexity of natural phenomena and of the finitude of the resources fuelling the infrastructure of digital animation. The narrative of Moana complements this tension by presenting a fantastical mediation between its eponymous protagonist and her oceanic environment. In doing so, Moana recasts the political role of the female subject in the borderlands of the imperial imaginary, presenting her as an eminently powerful ecopolitical agent.