WATER WHIRLED

Action in the Pacific in Disney's girl-powered Polynesian adventure Moana

If Disney's gazillion-dollar-grossing Frozen was the perfect holiday animated feature of 2013, with its snowy Nordic landscape, and supporting cast that included a snowman and a reindeer, Disney's new cartoon feature, Moana, is the perfect holiday movie for the opposite reason — enveloped in the landscape and folklore of the Pacific Islands, it's a sunny, beachy, gorgeously animated antidote to winter.

Moana is directed by Disney veterans Ron Clements and John Musker and their creative team, the brain trust behind The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Princess and the Frog, among others. The movie's story and look are steeped in Polynesian mythology, and it features a principal voice cast of mostly Pacfic Islander descent, along with a songwriting team that includes Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton fame.

The result is a wonderful, girl-power tale of a young woman on a quest to find herself and fulfill her destiny.

Moana: Chosen by the Sea

Scripted by Jared Bush, from a story concocted by Clements, Musker, and their minions, Moana begins with an origin myth about the creation of life in the world, and a slumbering earth goddess in the shape of an island.

But a trickster demigod called Maui stole the sparkling green heart of the goddess, and now the seas are restless, and life in the islands is imperiled.

This tale is told by Gramma Tala (Rachel House) to an audience of rapt island children, and none are more thrilled than her own granddaughter, Moana.

In a brief, frisky montage, we see Moana as a toddler, child, and tween, repeatedly sneaking down to the beach to commune with the sea, only to be dragged back to the village by her father, the chieftan (Maori actor Temuera Morrison). The sea is dangerous, he keeps telling her, but life is beautiful in the village, where her destiny is to lead the people one day.

Moana discovers forbidden boats: love the design on that hull

But the sea herself disagrees. One day when little Moana protects a sea turtle hatchling from predator birds as it crawls into the sea, a wave rises up in a beautiful green spout and deposits a trail of conch shells leading into the ocean at the child's feet.

Her grandmother tells her the sea has chosen Moana to find Maui and return the heart to the sleeping island, far away across the ocean — even though her father forbids anyone from sailing their outrigger boats past the reef that surrounds their island.

Gramma Tala communes with the Sea

But by the time Moana is a young woman (now voiced by Auli'i Cravalho), a coconut blight, and a dwindling fish supply, put island life in jeopardy. The sea reveals the lost heart to Moana, and, at her grandmother's urging, she sets off past the reef, through stormy seas, to find Maui.

The relationship between girl and grandmother is very tender. When Moana is reluctant to leave her granny behind at the start of her quest, Gramma Tala tells her "There is nowhere you can go that I won't be with you."

Navigating by a constellation shaped like the Maui's fabled fish-hook, Moana finds the desolate salt island where the demigod has long been stranded for his crime. With a body full of tattoos, and plenty of attitude, Maui (voice of Dwayne Johnson; turns out he's part Samoan), doesn't care about Moana's quest, but he covets her boat.

When the sea prevents him from throwing Moana overboard, Maui reluctantly adopts a big brother attitude toward her, and they set out to fix the mess he's made.

After a bizarrely funny encounter with a few boatloads of ferocious pirates made out of coconuts, they visit a scavenger crab (Jemaine Clement provides its sleepy hipster voice) to retrieve the magic fish-hook that allows Maui to shape-shift. (Although, when he wants to soar like a raptor, he's just as likely to find himself transformed into a bug, instead, or an airborne shark.)

A pet chicken provides comedy relief, and the movie spoofs the whole Disney Princess brand. When Moana bristles at that designation, Maui cracks, "If you wear a dress and you have an animal sidekick, you're a princess."

Moana's determination to become a Wayfinder echoes another great girl-power movie, Whale Rider. And, most cool are Maui's tattoos, which not only move around and tell their own animated stories, but act as Maui's conscience.

Maui's animated tats: Every picture tells a story

 Like Brave before it, Moana is a newly-minted adventure that's not based on a classic fairy tale, and a Disney Princess movie that doesn't need a prince. It's also great to see the folks at Disney pursuing diversity with such a vengeance, after their first 60 years of all-white heroines. (Remember when it was a big deal that Belle in Beauty and the Beast had brown eyes, not blue?)

Bursting with color, music, beautiful seagoing vistas, and the mythology and folkways of the Pacific Islands, Moana is guaranteed to cure your winter blahs.

BRAVE NEW GIRLS

What Disney Princess movies say about gender, culture, and romance

What would the holidays be without a new Disney feature cartoon? With Frozen, the studio is in full "Disney Princess" mode—the line of femme-centric fairy tale movies designed to market Mattel dolls, outfits and accessories to little girls. (Especially now, as the holiday buying season ramps up.) A marketing ploy made all the more obvious when the movie is animated via CGI, and all the characters already look like plastic dolls, with their smooth, unlined skin and dimensional shading.

Let's take a moment to consider the history of the brand. At least since the revisionist '70s, we've all been yammering on about the evolution, or lack thereof, of Disney's fairy tale cartoon heroines, but I think it's interesting to see how they've reflected their times.

  Snow White was sort of a neutered '30s chorus girl (Betty Boop, without sex), with her bobbed hair and baby-doll voice, pining for her prince to come. Cinderella was the obedient drudge, ca. 1950, sublimating her own desires. A decade later, Sleeping Beauty could let her hair down, but she was still the poster girl for passivity; her most dynamic action was to fall asleep for 100 years.

But since the resurgence of fairy tale princess movies that began in 1989 with Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Disney heroines have become more resourceful, spunky (and, oh please, don't make me write "pro-active"), in taking charge of their lives. And more ethnically diverse—grudgingly—if you count Chinese warrior princess Mulan, and Jasmine, from Aladdin, although it took 72 years for the first black Disney cartoon heroine, Tiana, from The Princess and the Frog in 2009.

Very loosely inspired by Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale, The Snow Queen (although it has only the vaguest nodding acquaintance with the source material), Frozen is one of the whitest of all Disney Princess movies. Not only is it set in a Scandinavian island kingdom perched on a fjord and full of Nordic blondes, but there's the whole snow thing—a princess with uncontrollable magical powers whose touch turns everything to ice.

After Princess Elsa accidentally freezes the kingdom in perpetual winter, she flees up into the mountains and magicks herself a crystal ice palace. The rest of the movie follows her sister, Princess Anna, on a trek across the snowy mountains to find her sister and save the realm. Her unlikely guide is humble woodworker and ice delivery man, Kristoff, while she leaves the kingdom under the protection of neighbor Prince Hans.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's two Disney princesses, one handsome prince, and one roguish commoner.

Which brings us to another topic: the evolution of the Disney cartoon hero. Seriously, does anyone even remember the bland, boring, cookie-cutter "Prince Charmings" of those earlier films? The first one to distinguish himself from the pack was Beauty's splendid Beast in 1991, and even he morphed back into a (yawn) prince at the end.

But finally, the folks at Disney are starting to perceive that their new breed of heroine deserves better, maybe a male counterpart with, you know, a personality.

Frog Prince Naveen was a charming wastrel with a line of corny, yet good-natured patter; unfortunately, he spent most of the movie as a green amphibian.

Flynn Rider in Disney's 2010 Rapunzel movie, Tangled, wasn't even a prince, but a thief and a rogue, on the lam from the palace guard. Sure, the rascal hero is as old a cliché as the bland prince, and if wisecracking Flynn were a live-action hero, he'd be pretty obnoxious, but as a new Disney hero, he had his points. And in the landmark Brave in 2012, there was no romantic hero at all; bow-and-arrow sharpshooter Princess Merida was too busy finding herself.

The excess of heroes in Frozen might suggest a regressive step back to the old days, except for the surprisingly clever, even subversive way the love stories play out. And it's interesting to watch the Disney tale-spinners create more evenly-matched romantic figures, characters who grow and endure trials together, and end up together because they deserve each other, not just because they're the only prince and/or princess in the movie.

But wouldn't it be refreshing if a Disney heroine wasn't a princess at all, but an ordinary girl? Now that would be brave.