Moana- Can You Hear What The Rock Is Singing?

This is my fourth post on Disney/Pixar princesses. I like to compare these two sister studios. I did it with my very third post on Tangled. In that post, I argued that Disney should stick to traditional animation and let Pixar handle the computers. Since then, Disney has produced Zootopia, Wreck-It-Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Frozen, while Pixar has made mostly unoriginal plots and sequels. (I still say Pixar has never made a bad movie, but Cars 3 is coming.) But Disney is still a rocky road. I loved Moana (the character) and the plot, but not the movie.

Back when I wrote about Brave, I criticized Disney for building up an action-adventure princess and then having her save the day through sewing. Moana also uses sewing skills at a key moment in the movie, but she uses them to repair her boat and kick off a badass sailing sequence past a raging lava monster. I am officially crowning Moana the best role-model Disney princess of all-time. She sails. She does parkour. She has engineering and leadership skills and realistic body proportions. She defies male role-models, in choosing the path which is best for her, all while remaining respectful. She doesn't even has a romantic sub-plot. Now Disney must play the challenge round, put all of Moana's traits into a character with a healthy romantic relationship. Bonus points: lesbianism.

My main problem with this movie is that it was a movie musical when it should have been a movie and a musical. I am sucker for soaring operatics, but the songs were too slow and they didn't fit with the action driven plot. The final battle features Moana singing the anger out of the lava monster. It would have been a great stage moment, but I wanted to see Moana use her kickass parkour to win the movie. It's also how boy Moana would have done it and that's a small deduction from the movie's feminism scoreboard. (She also figured out the mystery and then called the rampaging lava monster over to her and stared it down, so still she's still a badass.) I wish for a re-cut of this movie without the songs and a Lion King on Broadway style stage play.

Moana also seemed uncertain if it was a comedy or not. It certainly wasn't funny. The best joke was an after the credits Little Mermaid reference. A few rewrites either way could have produced something much funnier and sillier or something more serious. I would have liked to see the serious version, the funny version would be an easier sell, but either would have been better.

Today, I took a break from catching Pokemon on a fictional version of Hawaii to watch an animated movie set in a fictional version of Hawaii. I am a tropical themed man child.

Moana features a character from Hawaiian mythology called Maui. If you're unfamiliar with him, here's a primer in song from.

(That song is by that sumo Hawaiian man you saw in the video. His name is Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Listen to his cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow sometime and picture that tenor voice coming out of that giant man. It's an uplifting and confusing experience.)

Independence Day: Resurgence- Fear and Nostalgia Near Las Vegas

Independence Day: Resurgence is a movie which depends heavily on hoping you will care about the child characters from a twenty year old movie without giving you a reason to care about their adult versions. As you might expect, this doesn't really work. At a key point in the movie, fear caused the President to make a bad decision which nearly doomed us all. This reminded me of my favorite modern philosopher, Dante Shepard of Surviving the World, and one of his favorite themes, that fear and nostalgia are two of the most destructive forces in the world today.

The destructive power of fear is easy to understand. Fear is why we have so many guns because we fear all the other people with guns. Fear is why we demonize immigrants and Muslims giving them more reasons to hate us leading us to more reasons to hate them. It's part of the reason why the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union which will lead to Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom. Fear is what gave us Candidate Trump and all the destruction that comes with him.

The first alien spaceship to appear in Independence Day: Resurgence came to make friends. They had good reason to be afraid. After all, the last time aliens came, it did not go well. But, there were signs everywhere that the ship was a potential ally. The experts encouraged patience and negotiation. The President took the path of fear instead of the path of thought.

Fear is easy. Fear is natural. Courage is hard. Thought is hard. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is being afraid and doing the right thing anyway.

The danger of nostalgia is less evident.  Nostalgia is about remembering what is good about the past while forgetting what sucked. Classic rock radio stations are awesome, but it's not really that music was better in the past, they just don't play the bad stuff. A lot of those bad songs were more popular than the good ones, but they have gone to the dustbin of history leaving the good behind. It's hard to believe sometimes because we are listening terrible pop songs of current events, but for the vast majority of humanity, there has never been a better time to be alive. War, crime, addiction, poverty, hunger, and disease are all at or near all time lows. We have everyday technology that was in the realm of science fiction when the first Independence Day was released. We are at full employment and the stock market is hovering around all-time highs. There are certainly many ways things could be better, but any objective look at the world says it's actually really good. And yet, there are forces around the world encouraging us to go back to a past which never existed. I am afraid if we do not stop fearing the future, we will wind up with a future worth being afraid of.

I have previously argued on this site that the 90's represented the peak of American civilization and I'm not sure I'm wrong about that, but I also understand that what made the 90's great was that they occupied a unique moment in history and that there were also many things about the 90's that were worse than today. I expect to vote for another President Clinton in a few months, but I would be naive to believe that would bring back the good parts of the 90's. We must make a better future through a new future.

Speaking of things that were better in the past, this speech from the first movie...

Easily, one of the best monologues in movie history, but I don't remember much else from this movie which is kind of my point.