When the Disney film Moana lands this November, it will feel fresh to many moviegoers for an unusual reason: It is a mainstream Hollywood animated film that casts featured voice actors of color who represent the culture being depicted.
Moana centers on the adventure of a young woman looking for a fabled Pacific island, with demigod Maui in tow. Princess Moana herself is voiced by young Hawaiian native Auli’i Cravalho – who was discovered after an extensive casting call – and Maui is voiced by Dwayne Johnson, whose mother is of Samoan descent.
The voice cast also features several New Zealand-sprung actors who are part Maori: Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), Temuera Morrison and Rachel House – as well as Nicole Scherzinger, who has Hawaiian and Filipino roots.
Moana will arrive in the wake of complaints that another new American animated film, Laika/Focus Features’ Kubo and the Two Strings (which opened last Friday), hired too many white voice actors for its lead roles. The film, which is set in a fantastical version of ancient Japan, centers on a folk tale in which some characters are transformed into animals.
Kubo features the voices of Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Charlize Theron and Oscar nominees Rooney Mara and Ralph Fiennes, with Irish-born teen actor Art Parkinson voicing the title role. In secondary roles are the Japanese-American actors George Takei and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, with the cast also including Minae Noji, Alpha Takahashi and Ken Takemoto, among others.
The Media Action Network, a watchdog group, has criticized Laika for casting white actors in the roles that receive the most screen time. “Why are white actors playing an entire extended Japanese family,” MANAA’s founding president, Guy Aoki, says in his criticism.
In other words, often when it comes to casting leading voices: #CartoonsSoWhite.
Gene Luen Yang, a Chinese-American cartoonist, says that the Kubo casting certainly is curious.
“There are so many Asian-American actors these days. It just makes me wonder why they didn’t just go with one of them,” Yang, a two-time National Book Award finalist (American Born Chinese, Boxers & Saints), says.
“The critical conversation around diversity is one that Laika cares very deeply about,” Kubo director Travis Knight said in a statement. And when I asked Knight this month about the creative diversity behind Kubo, he pointed to Laika’s global multiculturalism represented by its employees.
Hollywood at large, of course, has increasingly faced accusations of “whitewashing” – by which white actors are cast in ethnic-specific roles – with Sony’s Aloha (in which Emma Stone played a character who is part Asian and part Hawaiian), Marvel’s forthcoming Doctor Strange (in which Tilda Swinton plays a character who traditionally has been of Tibetan descent), and 2010’s The Last Airbender (in which some of the featured actors are white in the fantasy’s tribal South Pole setting) as recent examples. (Since then, Yang has written for the Avatar: The Last Airbender comic books for Dark Horse Books.)
Now, Moana can help lead mainstream American animation ever toward more culturally sensitive casting.
After all, if animation can’t do it, what chance does the rest of Hollywood have?