ABSTRACT

Disney’s Moana (2016) portrays a village leader’s daughter who leaves her home island and sails across the open ocean to undo a curse spreading across Polynesia in response to a Promethean blunder by the demigod Maui. The film’s popular reception focuses on its representation of Polynesian culture, often placing an emphasis on the corporate history and practices of the Walt Disney Company. This essay instead pursues an ecocritical interrogation of the film. While Disney is perhaps inescapably complicit in economies of ecological destruction and exploitation, the production, aesthetics and narrative of Moana nonetheless offer a critical impulse through what I read as an ecopolitical attentiveness to the natural world. On the level of production, the management of computational capacity and the techniques used in the elaborate rendering of the ocean reflect an acknowledgement both of the complexity of natural phenomena and of the finitude of the resources fuelling the infrastructure of digital animation. The narrative of Moana complements this tension by presenting a fantastical mediation between its eponymous protagonist and her oceanic environment. In doing so, Moana recasts the political role of the female subject in the borderlands of the imperial imaginary, presenting her as an eminently powerful ecopolitical agent.

摘要

迪斯尼的莫阿纳(2016) 描绘了一位村长的女儿，她离开家乡的岛屿，航行穿越公海，以解除在波利尼西亚蔓延的诅咒，以回应半神毛伊岛的普罗米修斯失误。这部电影的受欢迎程度集中在其对波利尼西亚文化的表现上，通常强调华特迪士尼公司的企业历史和实践。相反，这篇文章对这部电影进行了生态批判性的审问。虽然迪士尼可能不可避免地与生态破坏和开发经济同谋，但《莫阿娜》的制作、美学和叙事尽管如此，通过我所读到的对自然世界的生态政治关注，它提供了一种批判性的冲动。在制作水平上，计算能力的管理和精细渲染海洋所使用的技术反映了对自然现象的复杂性和推动数字动画基础设施的资源有限的承认。《莫阿娜》的叙事通过在其同名的主人公和她的海洋环境之间呈现一种奇幻的调解来补充这种张力。在这样做的过程中，莫阿娜重新塑造了女性主体在帝国想象的边缘地带的政治角色，将她展示为一个非常强大的生态政治代理人。