Moana vs. Coco: A Cultural Divide

Milana is a movie I thoroughly adore between the music the animation the humour and the best main protagonist of any Disney movie ever don't at me it honestly might just be my favorite Disney movie ever it's not the best but it's my favorite which is a pretty impressive feat considering how generic the story is you take that back look sometimes a simple story is what a movie needs in my twist villains video I went over how annoying the twists and turns were in the previous three Disney films and how more on a simple story with relatively simple twists was a much more effective aspect of this movie I'll take more on the story over Princess and the Frog any day what even happened in that movie I know I remember liking it but I might have checked out halfway through and I don't remember anything so anyone even remember anything from this movie besides the villain here's the thing with mallanna though it's a movie with a premise as basic as it gets it's your typical hero's journey story the hero lives a place they get called to a venture they win and save the day also she shows all the naysayers that she could do it the whole time here's a question the story structure works as a Disney movie sure but doesn't work as an exploration of Polynesian culture weird question I know and I didn't even consider this until I saw Coco that's a movie with a somewhat similar story structure a family who says no to a young kids dream the kid leaves their world behind and explores a new one they meet a giant talking coconut crab who single-handedly restores the audience's faith in mankind and entertainment oh wait that didn't happen in Coco so yeah kind of similar setups but here's one distinction I noticed Coco to me felt like a much richer story it's an exploration of a lot of things family lost regret legacy and music yeah despite being a company that makes a ton of musicals Disney rarely ever explores music and its plot lines apparently Pixar were the ones who had the idea to make a musical where the music is actually integral to the story ironic so Coco has all that going for it but I think what really sets Coco apart from Moana and most Disney movies have I'm being honest is it's thorough engrossment in Mexican culture watching this movie you feel like you're in this Mexican village you're learning about this culture and their traditions because it's integral to the setting and the story Moana being set on a Polynesian island with Polynesian characters is kind of an afterthought you get to see a little bit of the villages daily life at the beginning of the movie and you hear about the myths that their culture believes in but ultimately this culture doesn't really play a major role in the story it's just kind of the dressing the story would have been largely the same if Moana was say a girl living in ancient Greece and some sort of quarrel between Greek gods and her on a journey or hell if the movie was set in modern day and Moana was an aardvark and she had to find Matt Damon so he could help her save the world from the giant sharkslayer evil guy or something all I'm saying his mana is a story about one girl leaving her home sailing the ocean finding a guy who's been stranded on the island for a while eating the most glorious thing ever created in existence and using an ancient artifact to restore a deity to their former glory it's not a story structure that's explicitly tied the Polynesian culture it could happen in a fictional version of the present or in a fantasy realm or in space well on a planet coming 2047 live-action version coming 2050 - there's one aspect of more on this story it's cleverly tied with Polynesian culture however the long pause was essentially a two thousand year gap where Polynesians took a break from voyages and no one knows why this movie offers up its own fictional explanation of this real-life event I think that's a pretty cool connection to Polynesian history I wish the rest of the story had more of that but in any case compared Moana is relatively loose take on Polynesian culture with Koko the story in this movie directly ties into mexican culture and beliefs yeah pick started to take some creative liberties but the connection to Dia de los Muertos is there putting your family on the ofrenda passing down the memories them over generations the foods the locations alive the language it's all there and this isn't a story structure you can just copy paste into ancient Greece or aardvark lands it's unique to Mexican culture the songs feel like traditional Spanish songs and a lot of the lyrics are actually sung in Spanish some of them are just completely in Spanish they feel like they fit into this world in a way that some of the more Broadway asked Disney tunes often don't [Music] what can I say welcome guys we excuse this in a lot of Disney movies because we love Disney songs and we love the Broadway ask tunes but I feel like Disney isn't bold enough to produce one of their esteemed musicals without having the soundtrack designed to appeal to the widest demographics possible but hey that's just a theory oh also I wanted to mention that chorizo joke ever wonder why those guys think it's so funny that Ector choked on the chorizo even though you don't really get why that's so funny that's because Pixar was making an elaborate dick joke a joke that only Spanish audiences would find super funny again something about Disney makes me think that they wouldn't add an elaborate dick joke that only Spanish audiences would pick up on in one of their movies so why is there such a big divide between Disney and Pixar's takes on culture anyway they both do their research they both have really good attention to detail and they both try their hardest to pay tribute to a culture without being controversial oh no it doesn't he had a couple missteps with Moana but that's okay Disney is a completely controversy free equal-opportunity company with a long history of treating minorities with the utmost respect that's why the first Disney animated movie to have black characters with names came out in 1997 okay so let's see what happened Disney released a Maui costume that seemed to promote brown face yikes definitely a mistake but that one's the fault of the insane Disney marketing machine not really the film makers also people were upset that Maui was portrayed as overweight and kind of an [ __ ] as opposed to the slim noble hero depicted in legends you could argue that this is Disney's interpretation of Maui and they're free to do whatever they want but here's the thing Disney's interpretation is the only version of Maui that a lot of people are gonna know kind of like Cinderella or Snow White or Aladdin Pocahontas Hercules Pinocchio okay bad example this will forever be my Pinocchio but anyway having a significant figure from your culture finally be represented in mainstream media but in a way that you don't agree with and you think perpetuate stereotypes yeah that's kind of a problem there are many other smaller controversies that came up with this movie and I don't have time to go over all of them to say despite Disney's best efforts to be faithful to the culture and do their research there are a couple of blind spots that tend to naturally arise whenever someone tries to adapt a culture they don't have first-hand experience with I have nothing but respect for this movies directors Ron Musker and John Clemmons these guys are disney legends they're so legendary in fact that I mixed up their first and last names and the script got damaged but yeah these guys made so many Disney classics it's insane I have no doubts that they wanted to portray this culture as positively as possible but sometimes culture can kind of fall to the wayside in favor of dead take Kirk Uli's for instance another clements and muscular production that offers up a Disney take on a culture and their gods in this case Greek mythology and hey I'm Greek what do you know now I love Hercules as much as the next guy but if we're being honest I don't exactly consider this movie a great representation of my culture it's like looking into a funhouse mirror version of Greece is entertaining buzz Kyle weird and a little off-putting and okay I want to stop now please let me out of this goddamn funhouse I'm scared no one in the movie really says anything in Greek there's no traditional Greek foods or customs a Greek newspaper called it another case of foreigners distorting our history and culture just to suit their commercial interests look I already said that I love Hercules and Moana there's still great movies even if they don't get everything right and two more on his credit it probably gets much more right than Hercules but if a bland ass white boy like me is a little upset that Hercules doesn't cater to my slight desire for accurate Greek representation I can't even imagine how someone of an actual underrepresented race might feel about some of the more questionable aspects of this film [Music] Lindsey Ellis who was way smarter than me said that Moana despite its problems and missteps was still an improvement for Disney and it showed that they were making progress for movies like Pocahontas I agree that Milan as a significant step forward from that but the thing is koko felt like its own significant step forward from Moana and they were only released a year apart and Coco was also directed by a white dude Lee Unkrich but he did his research so thoroughly and created a movie so faithful to the culture it was a procreating that no one complained the only controversy that ever came out of KOCO was early on when a certain company tried to trademark the phrase Dia de los Muertos guess which company it was so going back to that question why did Pixar get cultural representation so right well Disney only gets a kind of sword all right my theory Pixar doesn't care about appearance or branding this is the company that made a movie about a goddamn rat trying to become a chef in a five-star kitchen in Paris they don't give a [ __ ] about selling toys their focus is always on telling a good story even if they fail spectacularly like I said Coco had the potential to alienate people who weren't familiar with Mexican culture but Pixar went ahead and made this movie anyway introducing people to this culture by giving it such a three-dimensional tape and making it entangle to the story and yeah to be fair Disney is the company that ended up releasing it with a 20-minute frozen short attach the beginning twist villain I dunno Disney releasing this movie all about Mexican culture and having the literal whitish it imaginable preceding it not a cute look but that's just silly Disney would never put branding and potential merchandise before telling a culturally relevant story right right anyway after all that you might be wondering if I prefer Coco over Moana no Coco is really good not just because of its cultural accuracy but because of its songs characters and insanely powerful emotion but it has Story flaws here and there a lack of real tension for a fair portion of the movie it rehashes a lot of elements from previous Pixar movies and I don't think it's all that funny which is kind of shocking for Pixar Moana meanwhile has a safe story and a lot of blind spots when it comes to the culture but it excels at everything else the characters the humor the drama the action the songs the shiny it's my favorite Disney movie because it does almost everything perfectly and yet I wanted to criticize it why because while I came out of the theater having loved nearly every second of the experience I came out of koko feeling like I learned something about a culture I knew next to nothing about also I was bawling my eyes out so there's that any way you look at it Disney has a long way to go in terms of representation but maybe they could take a lesson from Pixar's book they want to tell an original story and she just put faith in it and don't try to appeal to as wide of a consumer base as possible a good story is like music there's all sorts of different types of music out there and not every song appeals that every person Disney doesn't seem to believe that an audience will listen to a song it sounds a little different than what they're used to but the truth is that doesn't matter they will listen to music [Music] [Music]

Channel: Schaffrillas Productions

Views: 2,503,164

Keywords: Schaffrillas Productions, Moana, Coco, Disney, Pixar, Hercules

Id: YBTV6dzMvyg

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/myqueeeen]

I disagree with the statement it wasn't about Polynesian culture. Sailing IS Polynesian culture. It was about Moana bringing the whole culture back to her people who had almost forgotten who they were. Look at Eddie Aikau's story and the Hokulea for reference. Anyway Coco is great too.

[u/BuddhistSagan]

I loved them both. I think coco was a more unique film with a more inspirational message, but I found moana more compelling and entertaining. I mean The Rock singing? How are you gonna not love that. Both definitely worth seeing.

[u/gingersluck]

Maybe I need to rewatch Moana since its been over two years, but I remember a lot of cultural history and stories being told throughout the movie.

[u/Johnny_Noodle_Arms]

People who are massively concerned with cultural appropriation in Disney movies are the lowest form of upper-middle class life.