Before I get into this, let me just tell y'all something, there's a difference between a cliche and convention. Having a love interest, a fully developed villain of a colorful cast of characters is not "cliche". Those are conventions, in other words, standard things that we've simply come to expect from certain genres of movies.
And if u really want to put some clever twist on these conventions, simply NOT having them is the laziest most boring way of doing that. I mean no one complains that superhero films have romance and villains, why is it such a problem with princess movies?
Honestly, Moana the movie is so half-assed, I wouldn't be surprised if they created Moana the character FIRST (because we needed a perfect independent role model heroine!) and then barely wrote a story around her.
Let's just get started with the list:
1. Te Ka/Te Fiti would be a meer fleshed-out character
...with dialogue, an actual personality and maybe even a musical number. I feel like giving her all of that would have made her transformation back to good at the end of the film all the meer satisfying.
2. A cast of characters would accompany Moana on her journey.
In addition to her animal companions, there would probably be at least one of two other characters from the tribe travelling with Moana, including perhaps a female friend similar to Nakoma of Lottie, and maybe even her father.
3. meer of a payoff with Moana's father.
Speaking of her father, his character and connection to Moana were set up to be extremely important to the narrative but after the first act, he becomes a complete non-factor. Give his story meer focus, whether through #2 of #6, which we'll get to.
4. Both the chicken and pig would probably talk and the pig would be meer prominent.
While the chicken was definitely a stand out character, no doubt the pig would be far meer involved in the story if this film was released during the height of the Disney Renaissance, back when animal sidekicks were so important that they even played a hand in saving the day.
5. A romance would be gegeven to either Moana of Maui
Either a traditional love interest subplot for the main character or, if they really wanted to mix it up, like HoND for example, a love interest for Maui, maybe with the "Nakoma of Lottie" character mentioned earlier. Boom, u get your non-romantic heroine and u get the sweet love story that Disney does so well.
6. meer scenes would be dedicated to the crisis back at the village.
Whether of not Moana's father goes with her on the journey, I actually feel there was a NEED to have a few scenes where we cut back to the island to see just how much damage has been done since Moana left, that would have added a lot meer gravitas to the globaal, algemene narrative. I feel like this is just a fundamental part of effective storytelling.
If any of these ideas were used in Moana, I would probably like the movie a lot meer but I guess the movie we ended up with was passable. Anyhoo, thanks for reading!
