Robert Flaherty's Moana (1926) and Disney's Moana (2016)

For a quarter of a century pretty much everything coming out of our domestic film industry has aspired to the condition of the animated cartoon (as Walter Pater said the other arts did to the condition of music).
--James Bowman, "The New Criterion," Dec. 2016

Today Flaherty seems touchingly romantic in his desire to find people who have escaped the corruption of civilization.
--Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

I  don’t get out to too many movies these days (for many reasons, which I will go into at another time) but our five-year-old daughter’s school recently had a showing at our local Brooklyn theatre, the Alpine:  ten bucks for the movie, including soda and popcorn.  So Susan and I took our daughter to her first movie (our older son came also).  The theatre was comfortable, the sound and projection good; only the movie itself –Disney’s Moana—was lousy, transferring a Disney princess to the South Seas, typical bubblegum songs included.  The movie was more assembled than created -- the use of four directors indicates that – and was totally confusing:  I understood nothing about what was going on, though my daughter was occasionally scared.  I admit that I have never been a big fan of animation, though the current computer-animated cartoons are even more claustrophobic than the hand-drawn ones were.  And why do the voices get such big billing –the god Maui was voiced by Dwayne Johnson, from many action movies – when knowing the voice only interferes with appreciating, to the extent one can, the character?

Returning to Robert Flaherty’s Moana of 1926 (available from Netflix) only indicates how far we have gone with film –in the wrong direction – in 90 years.  Flaherty spent two years on Samoa filming the natives doing everything from fishing to tattooing (a rite of manhood) to climbing tall trees to obtain coconuts and making clothes out of mulberry bark.  In the 70’s Flaherty’s daughter Monica returned to Samoa and recorded some songs and sound that was added to the original silent film.  Flaherty’s films are not what could at all accurately be called “documentaries” because much of what he filmed in Moana was a re-creation of the past, as was also true of his other films, including Nanook of the North (1922).  In Moana (a male name in Flaherty's Samoa, not a female one as in the Disney film) he captures beautifully not only “the wind in the trees” (to quote D. W. Griffith), but the movement of the sea and the indigenous people and their dances.