Disney has been accused of many things over the years, and let's face it, most of those accusations do have merit. Fairy tales have always been meant to teach lessons and even with rewriting, that never changed.
As a mother of young girls, I have been really pleased by the evolution of the movies coming out. In The Princess and the Frog we saw a young woman working two jobs to make her dreams come true, even to the sacrifice of the fun that other people her age were having. After the magic, she still gets the dream she worked so hard for but she also got love and fun. In Brave we saw a girl on the verge of womanhood struggling against the social constrictions of her gender and the expectations of her mother take charge of her fate. After the magic, nothing has changed except the daughter and mother now are willing to work together on the marriage rather than against each other. In Frozen, we see two sisters, both desperate to be loved, find true love is the ultimate magic and is found in sisterhood.
In each of these stories, there is a romantic subplot. Love is portrayed as solving the problem. This love is focused, usually on a single person. Even when that love is found within a family member, the story is neatly wrapped up with a hint of the Happily Ever After of one of the main cast. Tiana marries Naveen; Merida is courted by the three princes; Anna and Christoff are moving in that direction.
Moana (2016) does not have a romantic subplot. Moana is not trying to escape a marriage for alliance. She's struggling with the expectations of her parents, and the weight of her people's fate, but the solution is not painted as choosing between two things. When she runs away, it is not because she never intends to return or that serving her people is unbearable. It is because there is something that needs to be done and she was the one chosen to do it. It was for her people that she left to start her quest.
For much of the movie, Moana is convinced that she is just a delivery system. Her quest was to find Maui so that he could be the hero by returning the Heart. Her grandmother told her that she had to be firm and declare herself to get him to act, and because a fifteen-year-old has nothing on a millennia plus demigod, that didn't work out as easily as she hoped. She still manages to get him to where they needed to be, even with a pit-stop to retrieve Maui's hook. When things go horribly wrong, she finds herself alone and without hope. Tala returns to offer comfort to her granddaughter and act once more as the sounding board Moana needs. When Moana decides to give up on the quest to return the Heart, Tala doesn't judge her or pressure her to continue onward. Just as we see from the scenes of Moana's childhood, Tala offers unconditional support and love.
Thus begins the best scene of the entire movie (and there are many). The name of the song for the sequence is I Am Moana and it says exactly what the scene does. Moana realizes that she is just a girl and she loves, yes, but it is a general sort of love. She loves her people and she loves the ocean. She loves where she comes from and who she is. As the music climaxes, finally Moana declares herself and claims her agency. She is Moana and this is her quest.
In the end, she saves the day. The "enemy" of the movie, whose dark destruction was insidiously creeping over the islands, is defeated, but in a complete turnabout of the average fairy tale, it is not by violence. It is by understanding and recognition that things may not be as they first appeared.
As a parent, I absolutely love this movie. I love all the messages that it tells my girls. I love how the story is crafted--and combining the various myths of Oceania could not have been easy, let alone and hold true to the spirit of those myths. The soundtrack is both beautiful and catchy, and I would love to see some of the "demos" from the soundtrack animated because they are just as lovely as the songs which did make it into the movie.
A final note: I really liked that the animals didn't talk but still had obvious personalities. I also loved that Moana kept talking to Hei-Hei, but instead of pretending that he answers, she acknowledges that she's doing it for herself because he can't understand. As a cat-mom, that really speaks to me because I talk a lot to my fur-brat and don't expect him to really answer.
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