Or if you need to relive the film, because if you’ve seen it and loved it like I do, you probably do. In either case, here are a few of the signature songs in their entirety.
This one in particular makes me sob with joy:
The Rock sings!
(h/t Bluejay for reminding me that these are out there)
I’ve been reliving the film by looking at Jin Kim’s production drawings. He just posted a new batch on his website today:
http://cosmoanimato.tumblr.com
Those drawings are terrific.
I love this film, and love these clips. I think “We Know the Way,” in particular, elegantly sums up the central theme:
We are explorers reading every sign
We tell the stories of our elders in a never-ending chain
It’s not a choice between progress (at the cost of abandoning the past) or honoring the past (at the cost of stagnation). It can be both: moving forward while maintaining the links to your history, and finding within your history that which allows you to move forward. It’s also how Polynesian wayfinding works as depicted in the film: knowing your location and determining your course by keeping your origin point fixed in mind, or “knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been,” as Maui says. It’s a beautifully struck balance.
The character animation is spectacular. I love the moment in “How Far I’ll Go” where Moana is singing “I can lead with pride” while striding up the mountain. The marching tempo and those long, confident steps just say so much about the strength of her character.
Here’s “How Far I’ll Go” in 24 languages!
https://www.buzzfeed.com/keelyflaherty/now-you-can-cry-to-moanas-how-far-ill-go-in-24-different-lan
That video makes me really aware of the size and financial power of the Disney organization. They had to do a casting call in 24 different parts of the world and translate the lyrics 24 times, in time for the English-language release. Somehow, they found 24 people who not only had the talent to perform the song but also sounded nearly identical to Auli’i Cravalho. It’s a little sad that the voices are so hard to distinguish. It makes the movie feel a little homogenized, but it’s still a remarkable feat.
This is not a slam on Cravalho at all, who is amazing, but her strength is in the passion and conviction of her performance (both in dialogue and in songs), not necessarily in any vocal quality that makes her singing uniquely hers. She has a clean, pure, Broadway-style delivery which isn’t impossible to find in other singers — when it comes right down to it, she sounds like a young Lea Salonga. That’s a high compliment, but it does mean she’s very good in a style that’s accessible to others, rather than having a unique voice like Dylan or Adele. So I’m not surprised that Disney could find several other singers to approximate her performance in other languages.
And the movie *is* a little homogenized — in a way it’s a distillation of everything Disney’s been trying to do for decades — but it’s done so well, and with such love and craftsmanship, that I really can’t mind.
P.S. Have you seen the multi-language sequence they released for Frozen?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC83NA5tAGE