The New York Times examines the thinking that went into the character design of Maui, the demigod with the voice of Dwayne Johnson and animation supervision by Mack Kablan and Eric Goldberg, in Disney’s upcoming animated feature film Moana. The character is well-known in lore across the South Pacific islands, but nearly all earlier depictions of the character have him looking much more lithe. The article digs into the rationales behind why the character was designed to be much larger (sometimes running the risk of playing into negative stereotypes of Polynesian men and women), and the degree of research that the filmmakers went to in crafting the film.
Moana opens tomorrow, November 23, 2016, and the answers to some of the questions raised in the article are apparently plot twists that the filmmakers are understandably reluctant to reveal.
