Jemaine gets ‘crabulous’
Jemaine Clement didn’t realise his Moana character was so fabulous, writes
van Beynen.
2016 has been Jemaine Clement’s year of giants. After playing the villainous giant Fleshlumpeater in The BFG, the Kiwi actor has turned his talents to voicing giant hermit crab Tamatoa in Moana.
Clement was tipped off several years ago that he might be offered a role in Disney’s Polynesian princess film by frequent collaborator and good mate Taika Waititi, who worked on an early draft of the script.
The pair had worked together to write and perform a comedy play about Maui back in 2003, and Waititi had written a part for Clement in the Moana script.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that he learned he’d be playing Tamatoa. However his initial expectations for the character were a little off the mark.
‘‘Tamatoa means warrior, so I imagined a strong warrior crab, you know, with this armour, tough, and then when I got there in the booth I spent most of the time singing this song about being shiny, basically being fabulous.
‘‘So it was very different from what I imagined. But you can just roll with it a lot, you can just change your voice between takes.’’
Tamatoa is narcissistic and obsessed with looking good, decorating his shell with all manner of treasures and shiny objects.
Clement’s role saw him working closely with the film’s lyricist, LynManuel Miranda. He’d met Miranda around ten years earlier, when Flight of the Conchords played a festival with Miranda’s group Freestyle Love Supreme. At that festival, Conchords closed their set with Bowie, a tribute to the Thin White Duke that sees Clement imitating his accent.
Clement reckons Miranda had his Bowie impression in mind when writing Tamatoa’s song, Shiny; Miranda’s demo of the track sounds like he was doing an impression of Clement’s Bowie impression.
‘‘You can hear his demo on the soundtrack. First I went to sing it in the voice I had thought of for the character, but then he was like, ‘Can you do it more Bowie?’ I relented and did that,’’ Clement says.
Clement had great fun working on this film. He says there’s more room for experimentation in voice-work because actors don’t have a crew of hundreds waiting on them to get their lines right.
‘‘On set there are other actors who you can bounce off, but you can bounce off the writers, and on set you’re just worried because there’s literally hundreds of people waiting for you to get through whatever dumb thing you’re saying, you just feel bad if you’re messing around.’’
Although Moana wasn’t Clement’s first Disney animation, it nonetheless went some way to fulfilling one of his childhood ambitions.
‘‘The first job I ever wanted when I was about five was being an animator, and I remember on Worlds of Disney they had like a documentary section about how they animate, and I remember watching them drawing the pictures and recording, and folding over the acetate and going on to the next bit - and I wanted to do every part of it, I wanted to write it, do the voice, when I was five.
‘‘I just do one part of it, but I’m glad to be a part of it. The studio that made me interested in it is the one I’m working for.’’
Despite his own excitement about the film, Clement wasn’t anticipating the kind of reaction it’s had.
‘‘I didn’t realise because I’ve done other animations and even other Disney movies .... And then in the last few weeks since it’s been out in America, all the fan art and all that sort of stuff, they draw [Tamatoa] as a human, and they draw him as a human woman, there’s all these different versions and it was like, ‘Oh that’s right, these movies are like that, they have this big fandom behind them’.’’
Moana
opens in New Zealand on Boxing Day.