Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films
by Ida Yoshinaga
“Moana served as a glittery corporate distraction, an ideological pressure valve redirecting political imagination away from such momentous, defijinitive human events. “Sophisticated” US audiences in blue states, especially educated urban professionals, could feel comforting empathy with Disney’s onscreen simulacra of indigenous peoples—without having to confront the contemporary political realities of Oceania, where indigenous Pacifijic Islanders and Native Hawaiians face the threat of losing their ancestral homelands to global warming, military occupation, outmigration, and post- as well as neocolonialism.”