Gramsci wrote: Sat May 18, 2024 4:34 am
Back on topic… Moana, Mr Flack is correct Disney managed a film about Polynesian culture that didn’t suck. In fact for a lot of Polynesian kids it was a really empowering film.
Basically, I had a young kid at the peak time for seeing these movies a whole FUCKTON of times, as opposed to the more typical zero times, so suffer my opinions all ye:
All that about empowering Polynesian kids is absolutely true; they even made a te reo Maori dub of the film. This is important work, preserving a living language and nothing to be sneezed at. And look, the production design really is amazing in both films; meticulously researched and detailed props and sets in both cases, medieval Norwegian or Polynesian. It's like they went and digitised whole museums. They probably did. The snow simulation in Frozen is a work of art; likewise the water simulation in Moana.
So it is a shame that, after Frozen had - to my surprise - actually a very solid story, actually dare I say a modern classic what the hell I honestly thought it would be shit - that the writing in Moana is a bit atrocious. Not in a way that particularly stands out, just your standard 2020s bullshit, like the Mario bullshit and Barbie bullshit and all the other bullshit dads have to watch these days because nobody can plot a film.
But this has been my problem with just about every damn movie I've seen in the last I don't know how long. Honestly the writers' guild might have got my sympathy if they weren't such a bunch of hacks and I didn't wonder if AI might not do a better job anyway. All the stone-cold classic kids' films like Toy Story or Ratatouille or the Incredibles or the Iron Giant or Robocop, they had a story foundation you could park a truck on. Frozen nails it. Moana whiffs it.
But to circle back to the topic in a feeble gesture to forum etiquette, that bit with Maui singing "You're welcome" in exactly that kind of smug way is a fun bit.
Gramsci wrote: Sat May 18, 2024 4:34 am
Interestingly I recently discovered my regional accent is the only rhotic English in the southern hemisphere.
A Southlander, then. New Zealand only has one regional accent...