John Musker and Ron Clements know something about animated musicals, and if an Animated Feature Film Oscar had been handed out before 2002 they would have won at least two of them. Remember “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin”? You can thank both distinguished gentlemen for bringing both classic animated tales to life. And, as you can guess, with those films on their resume they have a good eye for recognizing talent. Those instincts provided them with an unexpected bounty while making their latest Walt Disney Animated Studios release, “Moana.”
Set on the fictional island of Motunui, the movie centers on the title character (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho), a young girl who teams up with the reluctant demi-god Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to save the ocean and her home from the anger and destruction of the lava god Te Ka. The studio and filmmakers wanted to make a musical that was as authentic to the region as possible. That meant a journey that would eventually take them across the Pacific Ocean and then back in the other direction to the alluring lights of Broadway.
They duo had already traveled to the Western Pacific including Fiji where they fell in love with some of the “most beautiful a capella” songs they had ever heard. That led to an introduction to singer songwriter Opetaia Foa’I who had created the rootsy Polynesian group Te Vaka. As you might expect, Foa’I was enthusiastic about working on the project, but both directors felt they needed a musician from the theater world who would understand their narrative needs, hence the trip to Broadway.
Enter none other than Lin-Manuel Miranda.
“We knew nothing about ‘Hamilton’ at that time,” Musker says. “We knew his musical ‘In the Heights’ and we knew the opening number he did for the Tony awards that featured Neil Patrick Harris doing hilarious songs. Lin really inspired us. He was so energetic, so full of ideas. We loved his work in ‘In the Heights’ because in that musical he would have some characters talk in Spanish and some in English and went back and forth. That’s what we pictured on this movie, that we would have Pacific Island languages that would segue into English. He seemed very comfortable doing that and also comfortable with working with a musician from the South Pacific.”
Miranda eventually wrote 14 tracks with Foa’I and composer Mark Mancina including the memorable songs “You’re Welcome,” “Shiny” and “How Far I’ll Go” which you can expect to hear sung by someone during the Oscar telecast in February. Of course, Musker and Clements had no idea when they began this collaboration Miranda would win a Pulitzer Prize and become a pop culture superstar.
Musker recalls, “He mentioned only in passing that he had this little show that was working on for the Public Theater called ‘Hamilton.’ A hip-hop musical about the founding fathers and of course we thought, ‘Good luck with that’ and then we were somewhat stunned when there was a Tsunami that followed. We saw the show and the show is brilliant, but we hadn’t even heard the music or anything. It was a game changer for theatre.”
The “Hamilton” phenomenon occurred right when “Moana” was deep into production and both directors admit it got slightly tricky as the star of the show couldn’t jet to Hollywood to work on songs when every show was a sellout.
“He couldn’t come out and meet with us, but we would Skype with him in his dressing room at the Richard Roger’s Theater in New York and he would be in his Hamilton getup just before he went on stage,” Musker says. “We’d talk about the songs and he would play demos for us and we would give him notes and it was a very interactive thing but we were very lucky that we caught him before this ‘Hamilton’ wave really engulfed him.”
If the songs are one standout in “Moana” the other is the gorgeous animation by Musker and Clements’ team of artists. One particularly stunning aspect is how the ocean is animated as a character in the film. Even though many films have created CG water (or oceans for that matter) over the decades there is a photorealism to the water at times that seems fresh and new. It wasn’t created by some new computer program, but by the animators themselves.
“Truly some of that actually comes from just the brains of our art direction lighting team,” Clements says. “They took some existing tools and just with their artistic eye and having done research, they traveled to the South Pacific. They did studies. They actually sort of dropped spheres into water and shot pictures of them and saw how light would fall off. It really, in some ways, saw the water of the South Pacific and there are kind of caricature that they took it and made it true to what their emotional response was to it as much as their literal response. They made it even more translucent. They made the reflections and the context even a little bit stronger in order to convey the emotion that you get when you see that water.”
Whether technical or artistic, their work – like that of Miranda, Foa’I and Mancina – has raised the bar for animated films down the road. Of course Musker and Clements would expect nothing less.
“Moana” is now playing nationwide.
