Over my month-and-a-half long winter break, my aunt suggested I see a movie with my six and twelve year-old cousins. “Moana at 7 PM tomorrow night!” her text read. I huffed to myself, knowing the animated feature involved Disney; the absence of my idol Mulan and other culturally diverse princesses from the frontlines of a merchandise store in Downtown Disney triggered my distaste for the Disney princesses (read about it here). The trailers mimicked all of the franchise’s previous princess movies: a young island girl drawn to the ocean pairing up with an exiled and powerless demigod. I grounded my standards as low as for any other unrealistic children’s film.
Confusion swept over me as I guided my cousins, large bag of popcorn in hand, to one of the only open rows in the movie theatre brimming with young and middle-aged adults. Why were all of these relatively old people here without children?
As the trailers rolled and the lights dimmed for the movie, I braced myself for a classic Disney princess adventure. The opening scene centered on a Polynesian myth of the shape-shifting demigod Maui resurrecting the islands and stealing the heart of the goddess Tefiti. Wow. Not some Americanized legend? I thought to myself. Moana’s figure did not fashion a dangerously slim torso like Snow White or Arielle, or plump breasts and rounded hips. Moana appeared as a humble yet defiant, loving, and ordinary young woman. The feminist in me raved. Throughout the entire movie, all of the human characters were Polynesian: the voice actors of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho both of Polynesian descent.
One aspect of the movie startled me above all others. All three of us—I, a nineteen year old in college; my oldest cousin, a twelve year old in middle school; and my youngest cousin, a six year old in kindergarten—all waited for Maui and Moana to fall in love. We were all befuddled when only a platonic relationship existed between the pair at the conclusion of the movie. Moana included no love interests.
Tumbling this fact in my mind days and weeks after, I realized why this irked my cousins and me to the extent that it had. From birth, the television programs and the movies we see define female protagonists and characters by their relationships to their male counterparts. Moana never kissed or flirted with Maui or any other male. To women and girls like us, conditioned by modern media to accept these twisted truths as fact, that females depend upon males, we regarded Moana as inconclusive since the young woman never experienced a romantic relationship. We mistook light-hearted joking between Maui and Moana as flirting, their hug at the final portion of the movie as an emblem of their romantic love. We whispered to each other, “When will they kiss?” I, a proud feminist, noticed myself stomping into patriarchal thinking.
I, along with the Internet in general, applaud Disney for encouraging equality of the genders and including cultural diversity in their largely white/male-dominated collection of movies. Hopefully Disney will soon implement characters of other underrepresented demographics: biracial, bilingual, and LGBTQ characters. As a trio of half-Asian half-white women, I plan on treating my cousins to the midnight premiere.