Episode 10 - Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016) (with Catherine Wheatley)
Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
For Episode 10, Chris and Alex travel to Polynesia to tackle their first computer-animated film - Walt Disney’s all-singin’, all-dancin’ and all-digital musical Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016). They are joined by Dr Catherine Wheatley (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London) to discuss the film’s gender politics and feminist register; its beautiful Samoan and Tokelauan-language soundtrack (with songs written and composed by Opetaia Foa’i, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Mark Mancina); its ambivalent status as typical Disney fare; and the ‘tiny details’ that comprise its message of diplomacy and female empowerment.
Suggested Readings
Monnet, Livia. 2002. “Towards the feminine sublime, or the story of “a twinkling monad, shape-shifting across dimension”: intermediality, fantasy and special effects in cyberpunk film and animation.” Japan Forum 14, no. 2: 225–268.
Stover, Cassandra. 2013. “Damsels and Heroines: The Conundrum of the Post-Feminist Disney Princess.” LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research 2, no. 1, available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/lux/vol2/iss1/29/.
Wheatley, Catherine. 2009. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghahn.
Wheatley, Catherine. 2011. Caché. London: BFI Publishing.
Wheatley, Catherine. 2019. Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema. London: Bloomsbury.