Moana

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I don't know if it has been mentioned before, but here are some facts about the production of the movie:

Quicksilver is the engine dedicated to hair simulation. In the past, the animation department would provide a drawing of what it wanted the hair to do. With Quicksilver, it can now put the hair in a starting pose for scenes and let the engine handle how it moves around.

Hyperion is Disney Animation's in-house rendering engine, built during the making of "Big Hero 6." Since then, it's evolved to have a larger scope and scale. Because of Hyperion, scenes with characters walking along the beach use water simulations that extend a quarter mile into the distance.
Matterhorn is the studio's physics-based graphics simulator that was responsible for the snow in "Frozen." It's been upgraded for "Moana" to handle mud, foam and sand. Its capabilities were expanded to handle viscous materials like lava for the living volcano Te Ká.

Water is a huge part of the movie. The initial goals were to have naturalistic water effects and also "performance water" -- water that acts like a character.
The team used distributed computing, a network of computers that share resources, to run massive water simulations. The result of this high-tech system: more water particles for finer fidelity and beautiful-looking water.

80 percent of the shots in "Moana" have effects in them and about 65 percent of them are water effects.
The water effects engine Disney Animation Studios uses is called Splash internally.

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Some facts about the old Polynesia:

Polynesian oven
Braising food with Polynesian oven is a method of cooking that demand a long preparation.
The eve of the dinner, a hole is dug into the ground. Its size is always proportional to the quantity of food that will be cooked. A fire is lit in order to heat white-hot the volcanic stones or coral pieces that will keep the oven warm during all cooking time. The morning after, mats are put down in the bottom to protect food from fire. Then the different ingredients are set down in layers : fruits and vegetables (fei, ‘uru, taro, manioc, yam, sweet potatoe…), entire piglet -formerly reserved to the elite – and finally the most fragile food like poe and fishes, protected with banana leafs.

Tools
To make their tools before the Europeans had introduced metal, the ancient Polynesians used all vegetal, animal and mineral materials that they could find on place.Thus they used volcanic stones, coral, shell, bones or wood, coconut husk and animal skins.
However, volcanic stones was mostly used since they are both hard and pretty light. We can notice that the inhabitants of atolls must have bartered with the inhabitants of the high volcanic islands since this type of stones could not be found on atolls. Actually, traces of old quarries and galleries are to be found today in high volcanic islands, like the Papeno’o valley gallery in Tahiti that reaches 4 m high in some places and 9 m depth.

[jazzflower92]

Gorgeous new poster (and the movie is officially PG)

https://67.media.tumblr.com/581ea683bb9 ... 1_1280.jpg

Tangled's is more "Bad Ass" if you ask me

I remember back when the Tangled poster first came out, and people complained that Disney was trying too hard to make it look like an action film.

[D82]

Regarding the new merchandise, we now have a new look at the lava villain:

https://cdn-ssl.s7.disneystore.com/is/i ... ?$yetizoom$

The Maui costume also reveals a new tattoo that was hidden under his hair in the trailers:

https://cdn-ssl.s7.disneystore.com/is/i ... ?$yetizoom$

It seems to be about his origins. I don’t remember the descriptions of the first scene of the film mentioning anything about that, so maybe it’s something that is going to be revealed later in the film. (If they use the tattoo to explain that, maybe it’s for decorative purposes only.)

[DisneyEra]

Tangled's is more "Bad Ass" if you ask me

I remember back when the Tangled poster first came out, and people complained that Disney was trying too hard to make it look like an action film.

This was the more "Traditional Disney" Tangled poster. I believe this was a international poster. And yes, Tangled endured a lot prior to it's Thanksgiving 2010 release & it wasn't pretty, the name change, the Shrek-like marketing. Remember the Pink/Miley Cyrus leaked teaser

[jazzflower92]

Oh yeah, I was still a lurker back then and saw how some of the negative reactions came out of seeing the different changes happen overtime. Although back in 2010,there was some justified fear that Disney would be trying to go all Dreamswork again on the tale of Rapunzel since they tried that once with Chicken Little and failed. In my opinion, Tangled really set up what was to come in this current decade and show that Disney didn't have to be Dreamworks in order to still entertain.

I know people are going to complain about Maui hogging the spotlight, but when you go the "Rock" voicing the character then you really don't want to waste him. Not to mention the fact that Maui is the supreme folk hero of all Polynesia. I think Moana will help Maui be thrown into the mainstream.

[Atlantica]

Just plain no to that poster. Why the endless obsession with smirking ?? I've not liked any of the Disney posters for a long time now; the last probably being the French Frozen posters.

[Sotiris]

Why the endless obsession with smirking?

But how else would we know that the characters are cool and hip?

[disneyprincess11]

Well, I talked to my best friend whose Polynesian friend auditioned for Moana at Disney World and WOW:

http://oh-that-disney-princess-emily.tu ... liberately

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I talked to my best friend whose Polynesian friend auditioned for Moana at Disney World and WOW:

I hope this is not an attempt to spread conspiracy theories about racism and so-called white privilege. Seems like no matter how politically correct Disney is, someone will always accuse them of this. Every time there is a white princess, we hear the complaints, even if the story takes place in Northern Europe, and if she also happens to be blonde with blue eyes, they go ballistic.

[D82]

International posters:



Sources:
https://twitter.com/TheRock/status/7757 ... 48?lang=es
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjQwWEbP_7Y
http://alexander-jarrett.tumblr.com/pos ... na-posters

[Disney's Divinity]

Does anyone else think this movie’s going to get heavily criticized for copying Frozen (re: Moana’s powers)?

[JeanGreyForever]

Does anyone else think this movie’s going to get heavily criticized for copying Frozen (re: Moana’s powers)?

Does Moana actually control the water or is the ocean a separate entity which just interacts with her? Sort of like a sidekick.

[Disney's Divinity]

I don't know. Her pose in that last poster looks quite a lot like Elsa shooting ice/snow out of her hands. I'm guessing she won't shoot water out of her hands, at least.

[Sotiris]

Her pose in that last poster looks quite a lot like Elsa shooting ice/snow out of her hands.

It looks like she's high-fiving the ocean which is worse, really.

[ce1ticmoon]

Hmmm... They're really pushing those coconuts, huh?

The teaser poster is still the best (obviously), but I guess these are okay.

[Sotiris]

I like this shot of Moana. This was taken from the promo for the new trailer's debut on GMA tomorrow.

[ce1ticmoon]

I like this shot of Moana. This was taken from the promo for the new trailer's debut on GMA tomorrow.

That expression would look much better on the poster than that silly smirk.

[disneyprincess11]

Beautiful! Three things I noticed about the teaser so far:

1. Why no new Maui Footage? Why the same exact footage?

2. I hope that the music isn't from the movie. Too popish.

3. What happened to the Jermaine Clements crab? They revealed him before the lava god, but now the crab disappeared out of nowhere

[D82]

Does anyone else think this movie’s going to get heavily criticized for copying Frozen (re: Moana’s powers)?

Does Moana actually control the water or is the ocean a separate entity which just interacts with her? Sort of like a sidekick.

It's the latter. The ocean is a character in the film and Moana has a special relation with it. It's different from Frozen because she doesn't control the water like Elsa controls the snow, but both elements are similar and the ocean probably does things for her in the movie, so in a way she makes it act. Depending on how that relation is presented in the film, I think it may indeed remind a bit of Elsa's powers.

Hmmm... They're really pushing those coconuts, huh?

I think they are the equivalent to the minions from Despicable Me or the penguins from Madagascar in this movie and those type of characters are very appealing to little children. I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow’s trailer features them prominently.

By the way, I was reading some more articles from the press day and I found a pair of details that I think weren't known. First, it looks like the scene from the Japanese trailer will eventually be in the movie:

Visual effects supervisor Kyle Odermatt said that an early test of a baby Moana interacting with the ocean, which was screened last summer at D23 Expo, became a huge part of the film. “We had the water character come up in that test, but we had no idea when we showed John Lasseter, whether he would say, ‘That looks too caricature,’ or ‘That looks too realistic.’ Thankfully, he loved it, we had loved it to that point. When we finished it, he said it was one of his favorite pieces of animation that he had ever seen — and by animation we mean the entirety and visual — the lighting, the environments, the water. I think that’s still true for him, and that’s actually why it’s still in the movie because it wasn’t originally,” Odermatt said. “It was in and out of the movie, it was in in a different way, and then we just all said, since it had only been shown at D23 and a couple of other places, ‘We want everybody to see that.’ And that actually became a big mandate for story. Incorporate that in, as is, and make sure it has a critical piece of the storytelling, and they did a marvelous job of putting that back in. And John said, ‘I want it to be just like it was as a standalone.’” When you see the sequence in the context of the movie, you’ll see that it’s not just like it was at D23–it’s better.

Source: https://ohmy.disney.com/news/2016/09/07 ... -november/


And Mark Henn has also worked on Maui's tattoos:

Eric Goldberg isn’t the only animation legend back at the studio for Moana. Joining his Mini Maui team is Mark Henn, famous for being the supervising animator on such classic characters as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Belle in Beauty and the Beast and the title characters in Pocahontas and Mulan.

Source: http://www.laughingplace.com/w/blogs/al ... 7/moana-1/

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Regarding the smirking thing. In the old days, the main characters were usually smiling on the poster, while the villains normally looked angry or evil.

Posters from all the Disney movies except the last couple ones: http://www.disneyavenue.com/2015/04/all ... movie.html

Oliver and Company is the first example where a character looks a little "hip".

The next on is Hercules.

The Emperor's New Groove show us not exactly a smirk, but still a little weird smile.

I'm not sure why the posters are different. Both Atlantis and Lilo and Stitch looked different from what I remember them. Maybe it has something to do with the DVD-release, or the different countries. Of course, now they have stopped showing any posters at all where I live.

Next there is Home on the Range.

If Chicken Little didn't have anything on the poster to point at, the intro of the movie did.

And finally Bolt and Tangled.