The Monday Column
Moana centres on a young woman looking for a fabled Pacific island, with demigod Maui in tow. Princess Moana is voiced by young Hawaiian Auli’i Cravalho — who was discovered after an extensive casting call — and Maui is voiced by Dwayne Johnson, whose mother is of Samoan descent.
The voice cast also features several New Zealand-sprung actors who are part-Maori — Jemaine Clement ( Flight of the Conchords), Temuera Morrison and Rachel House — as well as Nicole Scherzinger, who has Hawaiian and Filipino roots.
Moana will arrive in the wake of complaints that another new American animated film, Laika/ Focus Features’ Kubo and the Two Strings (which opened on Friday), hired too many white voice actors for its lead roles. The film, which is set in a fantastical version of ancient Japan, centres on a folk tale in which some characters are transformed into animals.
Kubo features the voices of Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Charlize Theron and Oscar nominees Rooney Mara and Ralph Fiennes, with Irish-born teen actor Art Parkinson voicing the title role. In secondary roles are the JapaneseAmerican actors George Takei and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, with the cast also including Minae Noji, Alpha Takahashi and Ken Takemoto.
The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (Manaa), a watchdog group, has criticised Laika for casting white actors in the roles that receive the most screen time.
“Why are white actors playing an entire extended Japanese family?” Manaa’s founding president, Guy Aoki, says in his criticism.
In other words, often when it comes to casting leading voices: #CartoonsSoWhite.
Gene Luen Yang, a ChineseAmerican cartoonist, says the Kubo casting certainly is curious.
“There are so many AsianAmerican actors these days. It just makes me wonder why they didn’t just go with one of them,” Yang, a two-time National Book Award finalist ( American Born Chinese, Kubo, The Last Airbender Airbender Kubo Doctor Strange Avatar: The Last Bordertown. Aladdin, Aloha Coco. Coco, you Mulan, New York Times reported how a lyric in Aladdin mentioned a barbaric act, and Disney changed it in response to criticism from the AmericanArab AntiDiscrimination Committee. The piece was The Princess and the Frog,