The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Move over, Elsa – here comes Moana
Three years after Frozen, a new Disney princess is ready for her close-up. Moana’s creators tell Robbie Collin how to make a billion-dollar hit
The sorcerer’s hat is so big you can see it from the freeway. Crowning the entrance to the Feature Animation Building at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, it’s four storeys tall, midnight blue and trimmed with a silvery yellow moon and stars: think Mickey Mouse’s broom-wrangling headgear in Fantasia, but big enough to top the tallest turret of Sleeping Beauty Castle. And in its conical shadow one September evening in 2005, JohnMusker and Ron Clements were finished.
On the plaza outside the studio, the two long-serving animators – directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and pioneers of the Nineties Disney Renaissance, during which the studio scaled creative peaks unseen since Walt’s own heyday – were having a leaving party. “Though it was not,” Clements wincingly reflects, “an entirely voluntary one.”
Treasure Planet, their Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation, had been a $70million-losing box office bomb, outgrossed by the computer-generated animation Ice Age four times over. The techniques taught to them in person by Disney’s “Nine Old Men” – the legendary artists behind masterpieces like Pinocchio and Snow White – were now expensive and out of fashion. To Michael Eisner, the then-CEO of Disney, the art form was dying – and Musker and Clements represented a past that the studio had to make a break from.
For what it was worth (not much), they thought otherwise – and in the preceding months they’d pitched a number of ideas to the studio. “It wasn’t like we’d decided we wanted to pursue other things,” Clements recalls. “But we were having a hard time getting anything going, and they were practically asking us to leave,” continues Musker. So leave they did. What happened next is one of the most extraordinary comeback stories in recent Hollywood history.
As you’d expect from Disney, there’s a happy ending. It arrives in UK cinemas next month in the shape of Moana, the 56th feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and the company’s first princess film since the worldconquering, billion-dollar-boxoffice-busting Frozen, so you might say there are expectations to live up to. It’s a marriage of cuttingedge computer graphics and venerable handmade techniques that no one at their leaving party 11 years ago would have dreamt possible.
I meet Musker and Clements five miles down the road from that sorcerer’s hat, at Disney’s Tujunga campus in Studio City.
Both men are 63 years old, and as a pair they’re a little Bert and Ernie: Musker is a fast talker, tall with a bristly moustache; Clements shorter, rounder, bearded and more contemplative. They look oddly familiar, perhaps because of their habit of drawing themselves into many of their films: they were parade-watchers in Aladdin, stonemasons in Hercules, Mardi Gras revellers in 2009’s The Princess and the Frog.
Moana is the fourth princess film Musker and Clements have directed – a timeless Disney tradition running from Snow White all the way to Frozen, and now beyond. It’s a musical, with songs co-written by LinManuel Miranda (the man behind the Broadway hit Hamilton) – including one, How Far I’ll Go, that Musker calls the “Over the Rainbow number”, in which, like mermaid Ariel in Part of YourWorld and Queen Elsa in Let It Go – maybe you’ve heard it? – our heroine sets her heart’s desire to song. But Moana herself, a bold young Polynesian seafarer questing to return the Heart of Te Fiti, an ancient gemstone, to its rightful island, would be one of the last to admit it.
“I’m the daughter of the chief,” she clarifies irritably in one scene.
“You wear a dress, you have an animal sidekick. You’re a princess,” her travelling companion, a puckish, Dwayne Johnson-voiced demigod called Maui, shoots back.
Maui, a central figure in Polynesian mythology, was originally going to be the hero.
To research the film they flew to the South Pacific and talked to tattooists
But, after pitching the story to John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Disney subsidiary Pixar, they were dispatched on a field trip to the South Pacific, where after meeting with Oceanic historians, linguists, archaeologists, tattoo artists, fishermen and others, they changed tack to a princess comingof-age story. It also subverts the princess-movie magic formula even more than Frozen did: while Anna’s happy ending in Frozen involved a reconciliation with her sister instead of a handsome prince, Moana does not feature a prince at all.
Ironically, it was Michael Eisner’s plans to tamper with Disney’s age-old magic that, indirectly, led to Musker and Clements’s return to the company