‘Moana’ had some hairy twists along the way
From bald Maui to six brothers, a lot changed before film’s launch
Once upon a time, the demigod Maui did not have the beautiful locks of hair he proudly flouts in Disney’s Moana.
Concept art shows Maui (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) as a bald hero, often with face tattoos. The hairless sketches are revealed here at usatoday.com as Moana heads to digital home release Feb. 21.
Directors Ron Clements and John Musker point out that Maui’s perfect head of hair was one of many key changes to the story that occurred during the five-year process of bringing
Moana to the screen. Heroine Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) also lost a brood of brother characters, while a villainous eight-eyed bat character had his screen time cut significantly.
“It’s a long voyage making these movies. Sometimes, you go off course for a time,” says Clem- ents of story changes. “Maui was bald for so long that when we first saw him with hair, it was a little hard to wrap our brains around it. But now, I couldn’t imagine him bald. Hair was definitely the way to go.”
While the bald look was appealing, Polynesian cultural ad- visers working with Disney pointed out that their legendary Maui’s rich hair is crucial for his “mana” (spiritual energy). The directors decided to bring in the bodacious mop, requiring an expensive and time-consuming process to animate intricate, moving strands for the duration of a feature film. In the end, both directors believe it’s a much better Maui look. “It helped with Maui’s swagger and his narcissism a little bit with the way he flipped his hair,” Musker says. The face tattoos were eliminated to better show Maui’s facial expressions onscreen. The eight-eyed bat character, a hideous foe in Maui’s mythology, was created as part of a group of supervillains (including a giant eel) who united and ganged up on the demigod in early story versions. “And certainly an eighteyed bat would be a natural for animation,” Clements says. “We had an extended plan for that character.” But as the story condensed, the bat disappeared from all but fleeting scenes, such as when Maui turns him into a basketball during the song You’re Welcome. A group of eight-eyed bats also flurries past Moana and Maui in their journey. Family size, too, was cut down. The young heroine Moana wasn’t always the only child seen onscreen. She had six brothers, including one brother who tormented her and another who was wise and supportive. In these versions, Moana was the best sailor among her brothers, but still overlooked by her father, Chief Tui. “She got lost in the shuffle a little bit,” says Musker, who says cutting those characters made the story simpler and more effective. “Like many things about animated films, the story just keeps evolving.”