The Tension between Cultural Commodification and Oceanic Relationality: Pacific Cultural Representation and the Imagination of Oceanic Community in Disney’s Moana Films

• Jin Wang

  Author

Disney’s Moana films incorporate Pacific voyaging traditions, mythologies, and music into globally circulated commercial animation. This article compares Moana (2016) and Moana 2 (2024) through Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “sea of islands,” cultural appropriation critique, and the blue humanities. It conducts comparative textual analysis across character development, visual symbols, audiovisual organization, water animation, wayfinding practices, island space, and transmedia circulation; production-company and institutional sources are used only to verify consultation, language versions, and product categories. The analysis shows that ancestral memory, embodied voyaging, and inter-island connection give Pacific materials a relational form, while heroic conventions and mythic compression standardize cultural difference for commercial storytelling. Personified water, canoes, bodily markings, the fishhook, and route-restoration plots also provide recognizable narrative and visual resources for transmedia extension. Available public sources, however, do not establish contributors’ ownership rights, remuneration terms, or benefit-sharing arrangements. Although the sequel expands inter-island space, it displaces colonial borders, capital flows, and unequal climate responsibility into a mythic conflict. The article argues that animation design can communicate regional cultures through coordinated visual symbols, narrative structures, and transmedia continuity, but cultural visibility cannot substitute for source specificity, knowledge ownership, or equitable consultation.

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