Moana

[PatrickvD]

I prefer a classy, low-key actress over most of the shamelessly self-promoting bimbos known for reality singing competition shows.

[Candy-Bonita95]

I am a little on the side of Patrick and Divinity's opinion about Dinah. Personally, I think the girl has a beautiful voice. I just don't think she is the prime choice for the character. She sounds older than 14 and sings in an R&B and pop style.

ALSO, as I mentioned before, they placed so much emphasis on finding an unknown girl with knowledge of Polynesian culture and bringing it to a performance for the universal casting call. It's not just color, but also the knowledge and skill of performing a cultural style. It's like casting Tiana not for the ability to sing a jazz but just being black. Choosing Dinah after all those call-backs is an equivalent to, "Fuck authenticity, let's just find a celebrity. The casting call was a waste of time."

[disneyprincess11]

I am a little on the side of Patrick and Divinity's opinion about Dinah. Personally, I think the girl has a beautiful voice. I just don't think she is the prime choice for the character. She sounds older than 14 and sings in an R&B and pop style.

ALSO, as I mentioned before, they placed so much emphasis on finding an unknown girl with knowledge of Polynesian culture and bringing it to a performance for the universal casting call. It's not just color, but also the knowledge and skill of performing a cultural style. It's like casting Tiana not for the ability to sing a jazz but just being black. Choosing Dinah after all those call-backs is an equivalent to, "Fuck authenticity, let's just find a celebrity. The casting call was a waste of time."

100% EXACTLY what my issues are! Her voice is beautiful and impressive for a 17 year old, but she sounds way too deep and old for a Disney Princess role. As for Disney choosing a pop star after ALL of that time of casting calls and having MILLIONS of girls hoping that their wish of being a Disney Princess coming true, being crushed, i will save that rant when/if (looks like when) Dinah gets announced because boy, it gets my blood boiled.

[jazzflower92]

I am a little on the side of Patrick and Divinity's opinion about Dinah. Personally, I think the girl has a beautiful voice. I just don't think she is the prime choice for the character. She sounds older than 14 and sings in an R&B and pop style.

ALSO, as I mentioned before, they placed so much emphasis on finding an unknown girl with knowledge of Polynesian culture and bringing it to a performance for the universal casting call. It's not just color, but also the knowledge and skill of performing a cultural style. It's like casting Tiana not for the ability to sing a jazz but just being black. Choosing Dinah after all those call-backs is an equivalent to, "Fuck authenticity, let's just find a celebrity. The casting call was a waste of time."

A few things they recently changed her to being 16 years old. Also I think people are leaping before looking. Not to mention Mandy Moore is a pop singer and she is more known than Dinah. Also Anika Noni Rose was a B-List celebrity just like Dinah is currently. How do we know for sure that Dinah doesn't know anything about Polynesian culture? I don't know if they picked her yet but its really jumping the gun.

Also Anika Noni Rose and all those other actresses who voiced the Disney princesses were in their twenties, thirties, or even forties when they voiced their characters who were younger than them. Look at Snow White she was voiced by a woman older than she was.

[TheSequelOfDisney]

Also Anika Noni Rose was a B-List celebrity just like Dinah is currently. How do we know for sure that Dinah doesn't know anything about Polynesian culture? I don't know if they picked her yet but its really jumping the gun.

I don't know if you can call a Tony Award-winning (2004; Caroline, or Change) actress with a prominent role in Dreamgirls (2006) a "B-List celebrity." That seems pretty unfair to me. If anything, this Dinah person is on a much lower rung of the ladder than Anika Noni Rose when comparing the two. I know very little about Fifth Harmony (I really only know that Worth It is such a horrendously and ghastly over-produced and over-played song), but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they chose Dinah over someone else. It would certainly be nice to have an unknown talent get the part, though.

[Candy-Bonita95]

A few things they recently changed her to being 16 years old. Also I think people are leaping before looking. Not to mention Mandy Moore is a pop singer and she is more known than Dinah. Also Anika Noni Rose was a B-List celebrity just like Dinah is currently. How do we know for sure that Dinah doesn't know anything about Polynesian culture? I don't know if they picked her yet but its really jumping the gun.

Now that's the character has been changed to being 16 years old, it's plausible for a mature voice to work. What I meant about authenticity is for the singer (Dinah) to be able to recreate Polynesian music with her voice.

Yet the core aspect of the rant is that Disney has spent so much time with the universal casting call that it's almost idiotic that now they decide to pick Dinah instead.

[jazzflower92]

A few things they recently changed her to being 16 years old. Also I think people are leaping before looking. Not to mention Mandy Moore is a pop singer and she is more known than Dinah. Also Anika Noni Rose was a B-List celebrity just like Dinah is currently. How do we know for sure that Dinah doesn't know anything about Polynesian culture? I don't know if they picked her yet but its really jumping the gun.

Now that's the character has been changed to being 16 years old, it's plausible for a mature voice to work. What I meant about authenticity is for the singer (Dinah) to be able to recreate Polynesian music with her voice.

Yet the core aspect of the rant is that Disney has spent so much time with the universal casting call that it's almost idiotic that now they decide to pick Dinah instead.

The thing is we don't know if they picked Dinah for sure. She could be playing a minor character or even the villain.

[disneyprincess11]

Now that's the character has been changed to being 16 years old, it's plausible for a mature voice to work. What I meant about authenticity is for the singer (Dinah) to be able to recreate Polynesian music with her voice.

Dinah is Polynesian, so I'm sure she'll do fine with the Polynesian parts. But, my concern is if she will/would sound like a Disney character or pop star

BTW:

just some random very minor moana spoilers from comic con
so on Saturday I went to a panel with a couple of animators who were working on moana, and obviously they couldn’t say much but here’s a couple of things they did say:

this was a panel about disney 2d animation, so a couple of the 2d animators who were still with disney working on moana said that they were trying to get their input onto the film as much as possible, but while the beginning of the film has a definite 2d influence, the rest of the film doesn’t as much (as in their input was getting ignored i guess)
originally moanas curls were supposed to be very very tight, but they wanted some dramatic shots of her hair blowing in the wind so they had to loosen her curls a bit (they seemed a bit upset by this)
they’ve already started to do 2d animation tests with maui (dwayne johnson’s character) but we probably wont get those for another couple of years (same as with those anna animation tests that are on tumblr)
i know this really isn’t much at all but they really weren’t allowed to say anything (they kept referring to moana as “this one project we’re developing” until this one guy was like wait we can at least say the name) but it was still a really cool panel and it was fun at least hearing a little bit about the film!

http://aspoonfulofdisneymagic.tumblr.co ... ilers-from

[disneyprincess11]

Now that's the character has been changed to being 16 years old, it's plausible for a mature voice to work. What I meant about authenticity is for the singer (Dinah) to be able to recreate Polynesian music with her voice.

Dinah is Polynesian, so I'm sure she'll do fine with the Polynesian parts. But, my concern is if she will/would sound like a Disney character or pop star

BTW:

just some random very minor moana spoilers from comic con
so on Saturday I went to a panel with a couple of animators who were working on moana, and obviously they couldn’t say much but here’s a couple of things they did say:

this was a panel about disney 2d animation, so a couple of the 2d animators who were still with disney working on moana said that they were trying to get their input onto the film as much as possible, but while the beginning of the film has a definite 2d influence, the rest of the film doesn’t as much (as in their input was getting ignored i guess)
originally moanas curls were supposed to be very very tight, but they wanted some dramatic shots of her hair blowing in the wind so they had to loosen her curls a bit (they seemed a bit upset by this)
they’ve already started to do 2d animation tests with maui (dwayne johnson’s character) but we probably wont get those for another couple of years (same as with those anna animation tests that are on tumblr)
i know this really isn’t much at all but they really weren’t allowed to say anything (they kept referring to moana as “this one project we’re developing” until this one guy was like wait we can at least say the name) but it was still a really cool panel and it was fun at least hearing a little bit about the film!

http://aspoonfulofdisneymagic.tumblr.co ... ilers-from

[DisneyFan09]

this was a panel about disney 2d animation, so a couple of the 2d animators who were still with disney working on moana said that they were trying to get their input onto the film as much as possible, but while the beginning of the film has a definite 2d influence, the rest of the film doesn’t as much (as in their input was getting ignored i guess)

Haha! Let's see if they'll fulfill that statement.

[Mooky]

With all the recent developments in the US, are we really still going to pretend like racism didn't play a role in TPATF's underperformance?

It was the title, the medium, this, that. Everyone is so afraid to name this thing. It's one of the highest grossing films with a predominantly African-American cast. I think Disney should be happy it even made as much as it did. It sold more tickets than recent Dreamworks titles like Penguins of Madagascar, Turbo and Rise of The Guardians. Granted, they were flops, but on paper they were assumed to be sure-fire hits.

It's also a weaker film than Tangled overall. The title and the medium might have played a role yes, but there is more to this than people care to admit.

On a semi-related note, Lily James, Disney's live-action Cinderella, was recently asked her opinion on which Disney princess would survive a zombie apocalype (James stars in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Now, the question is trivial and her responses may not be indicative of anything, but it is kind of odd that of twelve Disney princesses she was asked about, Tiana was the only one James was not very familiar with.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/keelyflaherty/w ... .slgKnOlXo

I know that opinion of one public personality doesn't have to mean much, and I don't know if her response could and should be projected at public at large to be suggestive of said public's racial prejudices or PatF's unpopularity with audiences, but it's something to think about. Some of the comments below the article are also interesting to read.

[Tangled]

this was a panel about disney 2d animation, so a couple of the 2d animators who were still with disney working on moana said that they were trying to get their input onto the film as much as possible, but while the beginning of the film has a definite 2d influence, the rest of the film doesn’t as much (as in their input was getting ignored i guess)

Haha! Let's see if they'll fulfill that statement.

I wouldn't be surprised if the very first segment of the film (like, where they introduce backstory or mythology, potentially through a musical number) is in a completely different (2D) art style than the rest of the film. Dreamworks does it all of the time, at least with well-recieved films like Kung Fu Panda or The Croods.

Also, I hope this doesn't confirm that the film will look super generic. Most press releases go "it'll look painterly" which I assume would require assistance from 2D animators (judging by the production of Tangled when it was going to be "painterly"). I'm still peeved that they're not making it like Paperman like they stated before, and if they don't try to innovate at all that'll be the final straw.

[Atlantica]

That was really cute ! Loved her little explanations.

And wow to the comments going on underneath ... almost painting Lily out to be slightly racist ? Which I'm sure couldn't be further from the truth ! Tiana just isn't as well known or liked. Disney could have done more for her after the picture, but they've not really made that much use of her at all.

[Disney's Divinity]

I don't think Tiana is any less-known than Aurora, for instance, or Mulan and Pocahontas at this point; the merchandise line really spreads the Disney stories around. Maybe Lily James just hasn't seen most of the films in a long time, so she can make assumptions about characters like 'Sleeping Beauty' and 'Rapunzel' (who would be known even without Disney) that it's harder to do with Tiana and TP&TF, which isn't really like any particularly famous fairytale. As for whether or not Tiana isn't well-liked, that probably has something to do with race; it would explain why most of the non-white characters are poor sellers in merchandise. They aren't any more or less likable than the others.

Snow White would probably die offering a zombie a pie.

[Sotiris]

Moana is the film that we're working on. We've been having some fun working on that, developing these characters in the early stages and now they're starting to move into production and things have changed a little bit about our role. It was fun for me to animate Dwayne Johnson doing the character of Maui, and being able to give my take on it, how I would approach Maui. Now, the supervising animator can take or leave whatever he wants from that but at least I got a moment to express myself. As an artist that's a special moment, doing things the way you'd approach it and putting it out there for people to see.

I've done a few tests and one of the things that I noticed that did influence the way things were done was the character of Moana. The Polynesian girl had a very tight curl to her hair and as we studied live-action we noticed that it didn't react a lot to wind. The animators wanted to see her hair in a more artistic way and not just a realistic way and so they had me animate some shorts where her hair was blowing in the wind or where she was pulling her hair, doing things with her hair so they could show it to the technical people and say "We need her to be able to do this. We want to have control over this". So, they wanted Moana to do things differently than other characters in terms of how much she can interact with her hair. In CG, it's really tough while we do it naturally in hand-drawn.

They actually went and changed the design, loosing up the curl because of the tests that I was doing where I was designing the hair shapes as it was blowing in the wind so it was a little more artistic and it wasn't so much as pure realism. So, they redesigned her hair so it would more believably move in that way. So, I felt like in some ways we were able to influence it in a positive way and maybe get some backdoor 2D principles in it.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0kiun93Gjg

“It comes with the territory,” said Musker. “We have Randy Haycock [‘The Lion King’, ‘Aladdin’] who does draw-overs of CG and to push things in terms of posing and can bring 2D ideas of how animation can work. Dabbler [the painting app from NVIDIA] helps loosen it up by deforming CG models and moving it more into the 2D world. It’s more graphic and sculptural, a better fusing of the techniques.”

Source: http://www.indiewire.com/2016/09/moana- ... 201723872/

[DisneyFan09]

Just make sure the hair doesn't become it's own character, as with Pocahontas' hair, hahahaha!

[NeverLand]

disneyanimation#Repost @therock
Cool 6hr voice over session for Disney's next big animated musical MOANA. From ALADDIN to BIG HERO 6 it's a real pleasure working with these brilliant filmmakers. Next session... it's time for me to sing.

https://igcdn-photos-a-a.akamaihd.net/h ... 8968_n.jpg

[unprincess]

hmm, I can see a lot of SJWs taking the "changing the tightly curled hair to something that can more easily blow in the wind" thing badly...

[taei]

Just make sure the hair doesn't become it's own character, as with Pocahontas' hair, hahahaha!

Or Ariel's... But I'm not complaining because it usually looks really good.

[DisneyFan09]

Or Ariel's... But I'm not complaining because it usually looks really good.

Yeah, Ariel's hair looks good.