Moana and What’s Making Us Happy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This message comes from Big Lives, the podcast on cultural icons. This week, World Cup fever inspires hosts Emmanuel Jochi and Kai Wright to unpack the extraordinary impact of football and power couple David and Victoria Beckham. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get podcasts.
The animated Disney feature Moana was a blockbuster with an enduring soundtrack full of songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Now, less than 10 years later, Disney is already giving it a sort of live-action remake. Dwayne the Rock Johnson returns to his role as the demigod Maui and appears in the flesh this time around. I'm Stephen Thompson. Joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Ronald Young Jr. He's the host of the film and television review podcast, Leaving the Theater. Hey, Ronald. Hello, Stephen. Good to have you. Also with us is Nikki Birch. She's a video producer for NPR Music and Visuals and also a co-host of the podcast A Thousand Eyes and One. Welcome back, Nikki. Hey. It is great to have you both.
So the plot of Moana should be fresh in the minds of... anyone who's seen it in the last decade, which is to say, everyone who has ever seen Moana. It's the story of a brave girl who ventures out beyond her home in the hopes of restoring balance to her island ecosystem. Here, Moana is played by Catherine Lungayan.
If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me, one day I'll know.
The story beats and plot points are repeated pretty much verbatim, albeit with a new Lin-Manuel Miranda song over the closing credits.
What is the new live-action take on Moana and who stars in it?
Moana is in theaters now. Nikki Birch, I'm going to start with you. What'd you think?
Moana is one of my favorite Disney movies over the last, I don't know, 15 years. And I was really, really excited to see it. Like you said, like scene for scene, it's almost exactly the same. And yeah, I didn't expect to get emotional because I haven't seen it since my grandmother passed. And there was a lot of like...
Oh, grandmother feels are big.
This one and Coco both hit the grandmother feels. So I'm really excited about this live action. Also because I'm skeptical of live action adaptations, but I was not disappointed. This one worked for you? This one worked for me.
All right. How about you, Ronald? You know, this movie really didn't do anything glaringly wrong. With one exception, and it's all going to be about Dwayne Johnson and his hair, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Lace front failure.
100%. Very Tyler Perry-esque. Yeah, I'm going straight in. But no, I feel like, like Nikki said, the first maybe 30 minutes of the movie, I was enchanted away. I felt as good as I felt when I was watching the live-action Lilo and Stitch, which I did not expect to like, but I really liked. And this one, the first 30 minutes, I'm locked in. This is very good. Up until the part where Moana... goes out to sea. As a matter of fact, if they would have ended the movie right there, I would have been in a puddle of tears. My goodness. And just be like, watch the rest animated, you'll be fine.
Have they ended the film without resolving anything?
Everything fades to black and crumbles.
All I'm saying is I would have trusted she would have figured it out because by the time she is leaving the island, I'm so emotional and I'm crying in my seat. It was really, really good. And then after that, it wasn't really the same for me. It didn't hit the way the animated original hit for me. And I think a lot of it has to do with the ways in which the live action elements interact with the animated elements, which again, I'm sure we'll get into. But if you like Moana, and I think Nikki, you're the prime example of this, you will likely like this movie as well.
Yeah. The music's great. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah. I mean, this has got to be Lin-Manuel Miranda's best film work. Like, the original Moana songs are remarkable, and we'll get to the new song in a moment.
I just want to say this. I didn't know that Lin-Manuel, or I forgot that he did the music, but I remember listening to this early on and being like, this sounds like Hamilton. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, that's why.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:49
2
What is the new live-action take on Moana and who stars in it?
1:49–6:32
3
How faithful is the live-action Moana to the 2016 animated original?
6:32–9:45
4
How do the hosts and guests react to the casting of Dwayne Johnson as Maui?
9:45–16:17
5
What are the pacing and visual trade-offs between animation and live-action in Moana?
16:17–25:05