Hello, I'm John Musker. I'm one of the directors of Moana.
And I'm Ron Clements, and I'm the other director of Moana.
MUSKER: And this is a movie that we actually pitched to John Lasseter.
It was back in 2011.
A simple idea, actually,
built around the character Maui originally.
Eventually, Moana came along.
What you're hearing right now on the track, I might add,
is a wonderful song that Opetaia... An opening chant that he wrote.
And that's his daughter, Olivia, who's doing that very lead vocal.
(CONTINUES CHANTING)
CLEMENTS: Yeah, there was a funny story that...
When that was recorded, they actually recorded it in a hotel room.
And when Olivia's doing that very dramatic chant
at the beginning of the song, they got calls.
I think there were people that thought
maybe someone was being murdered in the room,
but, actually, it was just recording this beautiful opening of the movie.
MUSKER: And, here it is now, so lyric and so beautiful.
So, this whole opening...
This is Eric Goldberg's animation, actually.
This is 2D animation. Most of this movie is 3D.
But we wanted this kind of prologue at the beginning
to feature some hand-drawn animation.
CLEMENTS: Even though this is the first thing in the movie,
it was actually one of the last things animated in the movie.
- Ironically. - MUSKER: Right. Yeah, and designed...
Ian Gooding had a big hand in this,
in terms of how we were gonna approach this tapa traditionally,
which is the pounded bark cloth. It doesn't usually have color on it.
It's only in browns, and blacks, and whites.
But we lit this theatrically
to get the color of this island of Te Fiti, this mythical island.
CLEMENTS: Very dramatic introduction of the character of Maui.
Now, this part was actually done fairly early in the course of things.
Storyboarded by our co-head of story, Dave Pimentel.
MUSKER: But we didn't really have an opening like this.
This came later, actually.
There was the thought that we really needed to set up Maui,
'cause, originally, we thought we wouldn't see him until
actually even Moana discovered him, when she went off to find him.
So, he actually first appeared much later in the movie.
But I think John Lasseter was among them, the people that felt
we really needed to set up this plot issue of the movie,
even though that meant showing Maui at the beginning.
So, this was added halfway through our story process, I would say.
Somewhere in there.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, this gets into the gist of it right off the bat.
MUSKER: And already, it's a showcase for our wonderful effects department
led by Dale Mayeda and Marlon West.
And this whole destruction of the island,
it was really a tour de force for the effects artists
to take this beautiful landscape and tear it apart.
And Maui, of course, transforms into these different characters that...
CLEMENTS: It was hard doing these transformations,
which surprised us, 'cause the genie in Aladdin was easy,
but transformations are hard in CG animation.
'Cause you have to design and model and rig every single transformation.
It's complicated.
MUSKER: And, of course, this is the appearance of our villainess Te Kā,
at one point called "Te Pō," but retitled "Te Kā."
In earlier versions of the draft of the movie, she actually spoke.
She had dialogue.
But as the story got reworked,
it was felt that it made her more mythic.
And she didn't really have much to say.
And we didn't want her to talk too much.
So, her voice went away, and she remains just kind of...
She shrieks and calls out, but no actual dialogue.
CLEMENTS: And now, we're into the telling of the story with Gramma Tala,
the wonderful actress, Rachel House from New Zealand.
And she's actually somewhat younger than you would think.
But she does a really fantastic job of voicing Gramma Tala.
MUSKER: And she does her singing as well.
She's just an amazing actress.
Um, again, this sets up the plot engine of the movie.
The destruction that's gonna come visited to the Island of Motunui,
which, by the way, is a made-up island.
Paul Geraghty, our linguistics advisor,
we asked him to come up with some names of
a fantastic island.
We didn't want to set it in a real place like Samoa, or Tonga, or Fiji.
We really wanted to invent a place.
And that was based on some advice we got from our advisors
that said "It's better not to localize it as much."
So, that island, Motunui, was invented.
It means "big island," I think, in a number of Pacific languages.
CLEMENTS: And here's Chief Tui, voiced by Tem Morrison.
Otherwise known as Boba Fett.
- MUSKER: Jango Fett? - Jango Fett. Boba Fett.
- He's a Star Wars guy. - MUSKER: Yeah.
I'm gonna throw up.
MUSKER: And that voice is the son of Bérénice Robinson,
our post-production supervisor, Maddox.
I think that was his little contribution there.
And the toddler,
the little sounds that the toddler makes, actually...
Louise Aliberti, the daughter of Elise Aliberti, our assistant...
Her nickname is Lou-Lou.
So, some of this is library stuff, but some of the dialogue in this scene...
- CLEMENTS: Most of it is Lou-Lou. - Yeah, it's Lou-Lou.
CLEMENTS: The design of this toddler is so appealing,
and a lot of that is because of Bill Schwab,
our brilliant art director of character design,
who brought so much appeal
to the design of all the characters in this movie.
And he did a great job.
CLEMENTS: This was all storyboarded.
This and the next bit with little Moana meeting the ocean
was all storyboarded by the great Chris Williams.
A wonderful, wonderful storyboard artist, director,
won an Academy Award
along with Don Hall for Big Hero 6, and was a huge, huge...
MUSKER: So, very early on, we just knew
we wanted Moana to have a close relationship with the ocean.
And even as the script was even being developed,
very early on, Chris, even before Big Hero 6,
he storyboarded this sequence.
Just really with, just a very sketchy idea.
This is her first encounter with the water as a toddler.
And we knew we wanted to really make her believable as a toddler.
So, we studied toddler animation,
but even more so, we wanted to make the ocean a character in the movie,
which grew out of our research in the Pacific Islands,
where they talked about the ocean as if it were alive.
CLEMENTS: Incidentally, the key to toddler animation
is to animate the toddler as if she's drunk.
And that works very well.
MUSKER: Yeah, I think they took a few of these scenes
and they redid her as a 16-year-old, and it was scary, but...
Actually, at one point, even this whole sequence was out
and we had her meeting the ocean for...
This was happening when she was 16 years old.
For a while, it was in the story that way.
But we always thought, "No, this is the better way to go."
And through various story machinations,
it came back into the movie. Thank goodness.
- CLEMENTS: We're happy that it did. - Yeah.
CLEMENTS: This was a tour de force for our effects team.
And, really, this was to prove out the concept of the living ocean.
How do you do it? It's not easy.
MUSKER: It was the first sequence really animated on the film.
And, again, the effects department,
they really had to use all these, sort of, engines,
simulations of water and combine them
in ways that had never been done before,
in terms of all the refractions, reflections, the bubbles,
the amplitude of these waves, the in and out of the surf,
and the foam at the bottom of the edge of these things,
all this really had to be carefully designed.
CLEMENTS: But, really, they did just a great job.
So, long before the rest of the movie was done,
we had this little set piece that we could show
just as an example of what the movie was gonna look like.
And that really helped a lot
in terms of just proving out the concept,
and also just having a nice, little sample.
MUSKER: And we're gonna see...
I mean, really, overall, the movie is so beautiful.
And, Ian Gooding, our production designer,
is really the one responsible for so much of that.
He went to the islands. He's from Jamaica, originally, himself.
But he took a bunch of pictures,
and he really has a wonderful eye for color
and the richness of the color.
CLEMENTS: Easter egg alert.
MUSKER: We always put a cameo of ourselves.
We try to, in these movies, à la Alfred Hitchcock...
And Ian Gooding came up... Watch very closely. Watch this rug.
CLEMENTS: That was us. That's us going by.
MUSKER: That's us right there. There we go. That's Ron and I...
CLEMENTS: The skinny guy is John and the chubby guy is me.
MUSKER: ...on that tapa.
So, that was designed by Griselda Lemay,
a wonderful storyboard artist on the movie,
and visual development artist, really.
And Ian found a way to sneak it in. Ian, our production designer.
This whole song, the village song, came late in the process.
CLEMENTS: In the middle, I would say. We didn't have it for a while.
And this really was a way of village life
of displaying a lot of the ideas about what a Pacific Island village is like.
MUSKER: Right, because we had Moana going off,
and she had to save her village.
But we hadn't really shown much of what was this life
that she was really trying to save.
And where we were really celebrating Pacific culture
the way we wanted to, having been there.
And so, I really think it was John Lasseter's idea
to really put some kind of song near the beginning
that really celebrated the world of the movie,
the world of the Pacific Islands.
CLEMENTS: But also, the problem.
The problem is inherent in the sense that there's conflict
and that we know that Moana is drawn to the sea,
she's drawn to the ocean.
And this clearly states that the chief has very opposed ideas
that everything is great the way it is.
"We're happy here in our village. There's no reason to ever leave."
MUSKER: Of course, we have our idiot rooster, Heihei,
who got much stupider as the movie went on.
Actually, he was in danger of being cut at one point,
because he just didn't seem to be adding enough humor to the movie.
And Ryan Green, wonderful story artist...
They all worked at, "How can we make him funnier?"
And Ryan had the idea to make him way, way stupider.
And that helped enormously.
And a bunch of gags ensued that played up his stupidity
that, sort of, saved him in the movie.
CLEMENTS: Yes, some people have compared the little pig to me
and the stupid chicken to John,
which, I think, is, sort of, a valid kind of comparison.
MUSKER: So, this scene, this is another one where, actually,
John Lasseter had a hand in this, to his credit.
We always struggled with, "How do we show Moana aging
"from a young girl to the age she's gonna be in the movie?"
And we tried it a million different ways and it never quite landed right.
I do believe it was John's idea, who said,
"Why don't you just cross-dissolve while she's dancing?"
So, it shows the length and breadth
of her relationship with her grandmother.
And it celebrates the dancing and the cultural ideas at the same time.
And I think it was a wonderful idea, visual...
CLEMENTS: And we could mention our choreographer.
MUSKER: Yeah, yeah, Tiana, who... The group, Nonosina, that she has...
We shot reference of her.
I hope we see some of that, perhaps on this DVD.
So, you can compare what the animators did.
They borrowed elements from her choreography
and pasted them together in different ways.
But it was really inspirational in getting the dance.
And that's been commented on by people from the Pacific Islands,
how much they enjoy seeing the dance in this film.
And Tiana did a fantastic job. Yeah.
This is a sacred place.
MUSKER: So, this was, I think, Jared Bush's invention, really,
this pile of stones.
It wasn't necessarily something we saw in the Pacific Islands.
But it felt island-y.
We saw maraes, which are temples that had stone foundations.
So, in a way, this alluded to that a little bit.
But it was a way of trying to create a visual symbol of the power of the past
that she was meant to connect with, and her role and her responsibility.
And I think it was a good visual device to, sort of, highlight that,
that comes into the movie in a few different places.
Jared did an amazing job in the last year of the movie,
really, sort of, helping paste everything together and great dialogue.
And he really was a godsend for the movie.
CLEMENTS: And in terms of Moana, the character of Moana,
I think really pushing this conflict
that she loves her island, she loves her people.
She doesn't necessarily wanna run away, or anything like that.
She feels a commitment.
But she still does feel this call to the sea,
and she can't resolve these two.
And here's another nice dance bit.
MUSKER: Yeah, again, John Lasseter... But we had another scene here.
And he's like, "No, let's do dancing. I want more dancing."
So, we added more dancing. Now, she's wearing here, actually...
That's a tuiga, which is the Samoan ceremonial headdress,
when a girl becomes a taupou.
Where you are
You can find happiness right
Where you are
And every storm...
CLEMENTS: Oh, cute, little pig.
We could talk about the controversy, but first, the cameo.
MUSKER: Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I know you recognize his voice. There he is, that long-haired guy.
And, in fact, the hair was based on Troy's hair.
We studied Troy's hair
when we were looking for long Polynesian locks
for some of the men in the movie, and he was an inspiration.
CLEMENTS: And he did a great voice job, too.
MUSKER: Of course, tattooing is such a part of the culture.
When we went there five years ago,
Jessica Julius, one of our development executives,
was with us, and she got a tattoo, traditional style.
Now, this little kid coming up, this dancing kid...
CLEMENTS: Yes, yes...
MUSKER: His wild dance is based on a guy we saw
when we were at the Pasifika Music Festival in March of2014.
There was a band... Or a dance group on the Samoan stage,
where there was a lead dancer who just went wild,
he was a bit the Chris Farley/John Belushi of Samoa.
And we loved his dancing so much, we said,
"Have that little kid dance like he did."
So, the animator looked at some of the reference
and took a little bit of a cue.
That was Andrew Chesworth who animated that.
Great job by Andrew.
CLEMENTS: And we should mention Alan Tudyk who did the voice of Heihei,
did all those little chicken sounds.
Also did the voice of this old guy who wants to eat Heihei.
So, there's a nice yin-yang there
that both Heihei and the guy who wants to eat him
- were voiced by the same person. - MUSKER: And speaking of voices,
this particular voice is the voice of Auli'i Cravalho's mother, Puanani.
She's actually doing the voice here.
John Lasseter was big on,
"Let's give her a cameo in the movie if we can somewhere."
And we had her in a few different spots.
Ultimately, we wound up on this spot.
So, when she says, "She's doing great, "
which she's about to say.
CLEMENTS: There's an extra meaning to that.
MUSKER: There's a meta-aspect to that.
Thanks, Moana.
She's doing great.
MUSKER: Yeah, see, she's talking about her own daughter...
CLEMENTS: Yeah, "My daughter, I'm very proud of her."
MUSKER: Auli'i, of course, you know, we've taken for granted on this.
But Auli'i Cravalho, after an exhaustive search,
you'll see some of that, perhaps on this DVD.
She did an unbelievable job, all the acting, all the singing.
She was only 14 when we cast her, 15 when we recorded most of this.
CLEMENTS: Turned 16 the day before the movie opened in the United States,
and is just a great, great talent.
Even though she had no experience either as a singer or an actress,
she was just a high-school student, sang in glee club.
But just tremendously talented. We were so lucky to find her.
MUSKER: That guy in this scene is actually voiced by Oscar Kightley,
who's a wonderful Samoan actor who lives in New Zealand.
He may have grown up in New Zealand, but he...
He was, sort of, a comedy acquaintance or a co-artist
with Taika Waititi, who wrote the first draft of this script.
And we loved getting Oscar in here somewhere.
He's really a terrific actor.
CLEMENTS: And Taika was great to work with
in the early part of the process.
He did write the first draft.
And he came from Flight of the Conchords
and directed New Zealand films.
And since then, has directed two or three films
since he worked for us for a while on writing on this.
He directed, um, What We Do in the Shadows,
hilarious film.
And Hunt for the Wilder people, and now, he's doing Thor.
And Nicole...
MUSKER: Nicole Scherzinger, who is actually
of Hawaiian descent, wonderful.
Mom was in and out of the story many times.
She was in most of our first drafts.
And then, for about a year, I think, she may have left the movie.
And then she reappeared again.
Fortunately, we're happy that she came back.
CLEMENTS: We always wanted Mom to be in here.
We've killed so many mothers.
MUSKER: And my mother's never forgiven me for any of that.
CLEMENTS: We really felt that it would be nice
if Moana had two parents.
MUSKER: Yeah.
In this night scene, we really wanted to give a backstory to Dad,
as far as, "Why is he so dead-set against voyaging?"
So, there were variations of this scene.
Earlier drafts had him actually telling Moana what happened.
But, again, I don't mean to keep mentioning John Lasseter.
But I do believe it was his idea. "Have Mom tell this story."
Because it's almost like there's a good cop, bad cop thing.
And she could relay it more sympathetically in a way
from Dad's point of view, for her to deliver it.
And Moana's shocked to hear this.
She's never heard any of this before.
But now, understands her father a little better.
But it doesn't help her with her basic problem
and she's about to sing this song, How Far I'll Go.
CLEMENTS: It's, sort of, a classic "I Want" song.
Again, there's parallels, I think.
But Lin-Manuel Miranda,
brilliant, brilliant composer, lyricist.
Very big fan of Howard Ashman and the work of Howard Ashman.
And, I think, really felt that he wanted to do a classic "I Want" song.
MUSKER: We struggled a little bit with
where this was gonna come in the story.
There were times where it came earlier,
and there were times where it had a different slant.
And, ultimately, I think,
it was better to come on the heels of some kind of setback.
And that's what we rearranged the story to make happen.
So, this whole run-in with her father there prompts the song,
which just seems to make it work better.
And it features a wonderful animation by our amazing animation staff
who really brought this scene to life.
Dave Hardin did those scenes,
and Svetla Radivoeva did these scenes where she comes up and...
CLEMENTS: And we should mention Hyrum Osmond and Amy Smeed...
MUSKER: Hyrum Osmond, yes, of the famous Osmond family.
Hyrum, actually, his father's one of the Osmond brothers.
CLEMENTS: It's true.
But we had never worked with most of the animators on this film
'cause all our films up to this point have been hand-drawn.
And we were so impressed with the animation.
MUSKER: Yeah, the overall level is just amazing on this.
Now, here's another Easter egg. That piece of tapa
is almost like a vague caricature of the carpet in Aladdin.
If you look at the pattern, the way it's laid out...
CLEMENTS: You have to look at it carefully.
MUSKER: You can get the analogy.
CLEMENTS: You don't want Easter eggs to be too easy.
But now, we're giving them away.
MUSKER: We probably shouldn't give them all away.
- Maybe we won't give anymore away. - CLEMENTS: Or we can hint.
MUSKER: So, this is, sort of, the crux of this song, basically,
where she's torn between the land and the sea,
her responsibilities and her pull to the sea.
And we tried to physicalize that
by having her move inland as she was drawn to the land,
and then back out to the screen right, which is where the ocean is.
So, all the movement now goes from left to right
as she is thinking, "This is what my real pull is."
And she goes past her ceremonial headdress.
CLEMENTS: And we got blowholes in the movie, which,
I always wanted to get blowholes in...
MUSKER: We had experienced those...
Yeah, on the Island of Savai'i.
And you'll see in some of the other footage.
They're just so amazing, these physical phenomenon.
CLEMENTS: And we got totally drenched.
You never know when they're gonna just totally explode and get you.
MUSKER: Again, the animation,
they did a marvelous job of really trying to coordinate all...
They had the complexities of just trying to get this boat moving.
And, of course, we didn't want her to be too good a sailor here.
So, she's doing some things correctly incorrectly almost.
CLEMENTS: Neither of us are sailors,
but we had some knowledgeable people.
MUSKER: One of our in-house sailing experts
was none other than Kyle Odermatt,
our VFX supervisor,
who really was responsible for the Herculean task
of getting this entire movie to the screen.
Which he did an amazing, fantastic, unbelievable job on,
but also, just as much, he helped with the sailing.
He gave people impromptu sailing lessons.
What rope goes where, how you move the jib,
what's tacking, what's jibing.
If only I knew any of that stuff. But, fortunately, the animators learned it.
(PUA SQUEALING FRANTICALLY)
Pua!
CLEMENTS: One of the most controversial aspects of the movie
was Pua's role in the movie.
He went from being through the whole voyage,
to almost not being in the movie at all, but we're glad he's in.
And there were reasons why he didn't go with her on the voyage.
MUSKER: There's a whole department on this movie, the lighting department,
where everything comes together.
All the animation is lit like a theatrical set.
And so much of the final image you see
gets put together in the lighting phase.
Of course, layouts has preceded this.
The wonderful Rob Dressel, who is the head of layout,
he helped design the way the camera moves.
But in terms of the look of the image, lighting does that,
and you can see even here, the cool shadows,
the warm, late afternoon sun,
that all came from Adolph Lusinsky and his lighting crew.
Unbelievable job they did.
CLEMENTS: We didn't know that much about lighting,
and we were just blown away by what lighting could do.
As we were also blown away by tech-anim,
which does things like Moana's hair.
MUSKER: But then there's the look department,
which had to do that injured foot.
They had to actually design...
They designed all the textures, both of the skin and the outfits,
and so, they have to decide, "How bloody are we gonna make this?
"How much of a contusion is this?"
And all those things are artistic choices that are made
by different departments within the movie.
CLEMENTS: So many different stages and different...
The film goes through so many different processes.
It's very different from a hand-drawn film.
We had to actually go to school to learn about this.
Put that stone up there.
CLEMENTS: Let's talk about Tala and the manta rays.
MUSKER: Well, I think, yeah, Pam Ribon,
who was, sort of, the second writer on the project,
Tala came in through her stewardship.
Wanted to have an elder that she was really hooked into,
some relationship, a grandmother or something,
so, Pam really wrote the first drafts on Gramma
and helped set her up as this quirky person.
And Jared, all this dialogue is Jared's.
Amazing in the way Rachel delivers it.
We wanted her to be a little bit eccentric,
but she's based a little bit in part on on Hinano Murphy,
one of our advisors from Tahiti,
who's very regal and totally connected to the culture.
Even the way she wears her hair, the way it's tied up that way,
that's, sort of, based on Hinano, who's a beautiful Tahitian woman
that really was a big part of our research.
CLEMENTS: The research trips were a huge, huge influence on this movie.
We learned so much going to the Pacific Islands.
Our first trip was five years ago. We went to Fiji, Samoa, and Tahiti,
and met incredible people
and learned so much stuff that we didn't know.
Some of that, we'll be leading up to in this next sequence.
MUSKER: Yeah, we're really getting into...
Again, there were different versions of this story
where Moana knew more about her navigating past,
but eventually, we worked out...
I think it might have been Ron's idea to hold this off
so that it was a secret that was being kept from her,
the fact that they were once voyagers.
And so, we got this really dramatic scene
where she could find this out for herself with mystery involved.
What is all this voyaging about?
And I think it really pulls the audience into the movie
more than the way we had it before.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, and that was one of the big takeaways
from the Pacific Islands, was the culture of navigation,
that they were the greatest navigators the world has ever known.
But they also stopped for 1,000 years.
There was a 1,000-yeargap, and to this day,
nobody knows why they stopped.
And then about 2,000 years ago,
which is when the movie actually takes place,
that is when they started up again.
And the idea was that possibly, in our minds,
that the reason things stopped
was because of the actions of this trickster demigod,
and that this young girl might be responsible
forgetting things started again.
MUSKER: Svetla animated these scenes, Svetla Radivoeva.
And these are some of my favorite scenes in the movie,
with that bounce light coming back on her.
You might notice the insignia on her sail had that double spiral.
That actually was written
in the very first draft of the script by Taika Waititi.
He really saw it as a visual symbol. Taika is a Kiwi,
and it's a strong symbol in New Zealand, certainly,
and throughout the Pacific Islands, it means various things.
But it has to do with nature,
and we really thought it was a great symbol to work with in this film.
CLEMENTS: We haven't mentioned the beautiful score by Mark Mancina,
which is really great in this section.
And also, the work he did with Opetaia Foa'i together,
in terms of the song that we're about to hear.
(YELPS)
MUSKER: So, yeah, we wanted a storytelling,
an image on this sail, and as Ron alluded to Mark Mancina,
he really latched on to that musical phrase,
"Ye'Kina", which Opetaia had created.
I think it literally means "You can do it."
And he pulled that out of some fragments
that Opetaia constructed, and used it as the background.
And here, we segue into
We Know The Way, the first song written for the movie,
and written by Opetaia Foa'i, as we call him properly.
CLEMENTS: And also, this was, originally, the opening of the movie.
The movie actually opened with this song.
MUSKER: And this is Opetaia singing here.
CLEMENTS: To introduce the world of voyagers.
MUSKER: Opetaia has a band called Te Vaka.
Osnat Shurer, our producer,
was the one who really brought Opetaia's work to our attention.
We loved the roots-y music that he had,
and we felt he could really give this color
of the Pacific Islands, to the score.
So, he was the first musician that we really contacted on this
to ask him if he would be a part of the score.
CLEMENTS: A lot of this song was actually written in New Zealand,
where for the first time, that Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Opetaia Foa'i, and Mark Mancina all got together,
and met each other for the first time at an Auckland music festival.
MUSKER: Yeah, it was in March of2014,
the Pasifika Music Festival.
And they began recording some things there,
and then continued up in Carmel, where Mark lived.
And this is Lin's voice here, and Lin originally sang on the demo.
We knew we wanted part of the song to be in English,
so, Lin wrote this lyric
and created a countermelody over Opetaia's melody.
But we liked it well enough... Even before Lin became a sensation,
we just said, "He has such exuberance in his voice.
"Let's keep his voice in there."
Then, as things played out,
he became known because of Hamilton.
That was almost after we had decided to use his voice.
CLEMENTS: Honest to God, we didn't know anything about Hamilton
when we met with Lin in New York three years ago.
We just liked Lin. But, boy, did things take off.
MUSKER: Yeah, he's become a phenomenon since then,
winning the Pulitzer Prize...
CLEMENTS: This sequence was storyboarded by Dave Pimentel again,
and was really one of the first sequences to go into production...
MUSKER: We always wanted to have a scene in the movie,
a song, really, that celebrated voyaging
and tried to get some of the exhilaration
of being out on the open sea
because so many of us have never experienced anything like that.
So, if we're gonna found a movie about navigation and voyaging,
we had to have a scene that really put you
right on the ocean with the characters.
And that's what that song was all about.
Why'd we stop?
MUSKER: Now, backstory. Gramma has to do some exposition.
Although, it was cool. Again, I think Dave boarded this as well,
and really found a visual way to highlight this story.
We don't like to just have...
We think of this as a visual medium,
so, wherever we can, we really want this to work that way.
CLEMENTS: Our goal is always that if you could turn the sound down,
you should still be able to follow the movie.
So, try it at home.
Turn the sound down and see if you can still follow the story.
If you can, it worked the way we hoped it would.
MUSKER: The whole idea of this cave being tucked behind this waterfall,
I believe that was Ian Gooding's idea.
But we love that image of ships being hidden behind water,
coming out through water.
It kind of gave a rebirth to voyaging, which was cool.
And this blight, there were different threats to the island.
Some seemed so dark, that we could never sing a song
because it was such a bleak...
The islands were erupting, they were sinking,
so, we wanted something that was impending,
but not right on the island, so it didn't seem like
it was a very horrible world that she was leaving behind.
CLEMENTS: As if there are bad things happening,
but most people can't see
the danger to the environment that could be going on,
- and could lead to trouble. - MUSKER: Yeah.
This is a restatement of an Opetaia melody from earlier,
and, really, Opetaia's song
when as a toddler, she first met the ocean.
That was based on a Te Vaka song,
and, really, the Pacific Island color from that comes from Opetaia.
CLEMENTS: We struggled and struggled with the idea
of the ocean as a character in the movie,
and how the ocean related to Moana, and how we still have limitations.
That doesn't mean that because Moana has this powerful ally,
that she can't have problems.
It was a balance issue.
MUSKER: And there was always a question with Gramma.
Because we thought she was going to die
and there were different ways it happened.
It played out differently in the story.
This is where it wound up, and it was a delicate thing.
We were trying in that last scene, to convey, sort of,
"My mission has been done, I'm at peace now."
And Jacob Frey, a great animator, had to animate,
then try and put that over in just the way she sat down and leaned forward,
and did a terrific job. Dad's mad now.
CLEMENTS: Speaking of great animation,
this is some really, really strong animation.
MUSKER: Yeah, Nathan Engelhardt did the stuff coming up.
This is Nathan's, as she really tries to pull him
and this is gonna propel her into this whole next movement
as he rejects her, he just discredits the whole thing.
Again, beautifully lit by our lighting department.
Adolph and all the lighters, just fantastic work.
And now we come to, really,
one of the most emotional scenes in the movie
as they head back to see Gramma. I just think...
- Of course, Troy Polamalu once again. - CLEMENTS: Troy again.
MUSKER: Troy briefly appeared.
CLEMENTS: This sequence was storyboarded
by the brilliant John Ripa...
MUSKER: Yeah, a ton of emotion.
CLEMENTS: ...who was our Co-Head of Story,
and a really terrific board artist.
MUSKER: Yeah, so much emotion in his boards and the stage.
The staging was great, the expressions were great,
the emotion was fabulous.
And the animators really rose to the occasion.
There was a whole bunch of animators including Amy and Jeff Ranjo,
and Justin Sklar and Benson,
and Youngjae Choi.
CLEMENTS: This kind of subtle animation is not easy.
It's very difficult.
MUSKER: Yeah, just even the slightest look from one person to the other.
Tony Durazzo's scene here with a whisper in the ear.
And, of course, there's an importance
to this whole necklace now that she's going to give over.
This is, sort of, a Joseph Campbell type moment,
where, really, she gets her mission,
when she takes that heart of Te Fiti, that little green stone,
and puts it in the necklace
and she's got her mission for the movie.
It's a call that she can either accept or reject, and she accepts it,
but reluctantly, because she doesn't want
to leave her grandmother behind.
Very powerfully acted by Rachel. When she did this...
When we were hearing her record this,
we were nearly in tears 'cause she was so moving,
and Auli'i as well,
just very sincere and believable, and a very tactile scene.
They do a hongi here,
which is a gesture of intimacy and sharing of breath.
It's done in the Pacific Islands,
and we tried to incorporate that throughout the movie
when people come in contact with each other.
It happened to us while we were on the island.
CLEMENTS: There were a couple of earlier ones with Dad and Mom
with the toddler.
But this was a really important one.
MUSKER: Yeah. And, of course, Maui on the tapa here, an image of Maui.
It was fun playing with the stylization of Maui
on the different print elements in the movie.
And now, there's this reprise.
And there were discussions back and forth,
there was always a reprise here.
But there were questions, which part of it would be sung on stage
and which would not be, and would we show Mom, or not?
At one point, this got cut shorter and Mom was barely in this.
Fortunately, I think, we restored it to these scenes
'cause it really gives you, I think, an emotional heft to her leaving.
That mom endorses this, and yet, is sorrowful,
but is giving her permission to go.
I think it was a cool thing that was in the boards.
CLEMENTS: Spoiler alert, but I won't go into more details.
But there was an Easter egg reference.
MUSKER: Don't go into any details.
So, now, this, as she looks back and the lights go out,
we were really trying to play "Gramma has died",
but do it offstage and then,
this celebration... We heard about animal totems
when we were in the Pacific Islands,
how people feel that animals would reappear,
their ancestors might reappear in the form of some kind of animal,
often a marine-type animal.
Then we thought a manta ray was so beautiful
in the elegance of the way it moved, that it really fit with Gramma.
And then, out of that grew the idea that, "Let's put a tattoo on her
"because that will foreshadow what she's going to be."
Bioluminescence is such a great physical phenomenon.
We studied it online and we had various...
CLEMENTS: We had videos put together that just all kinds of...
MUSKER: Right, but it seemed almost like it's Pacific Island Pixie Dust,
but it's so magical and beautiful and visual,
we thought we gotta exploit that for the movie.
And here, this, we struggled over this. This is based on the real...
There is a constellation of Maui's fishhook in the sky.
It's not as many stars as that, and it's a little tougher to pick out.
And it's really the tail of the Scorpion constellation,
but that's roughly the orientation of it in the Southern Hemisphere.
But we added more stars
just to make it little more explicit, so you wouldn't miss it.
Now, this kind of funny introduction of Heihei went way back,
and even when they were thinking of cutting Heihei out of the movie.
I never was, other people were. Like, "You can't lose this thing."
Even though Heihei's an idiot here, he's slightly more sentient here
in that he knows enough to be afraid
when he's out in the middle of nowhere.
CLEMENTS: It's his most sentient moment,
except for one later moment.
MUSKER: Yeah, but it's one of the biggest laughs in the movie.
Heihei plays so well visually and comedically.
Adam Green supervised the animation of him.
A number of animators worked on him, but Adam did a hilarious job.
These are Adam's scenes here, with her stifling this thing,
and Allen Ostergar did the earlier animation
where she's really fumbling around, trying to figure a way around this.
CLEMENTS: And Chris Williams brought some of the humor...
MUSKER: This was boarded by Chris Williams.
So much of the movie, key sequences have been boarded by Chris,
and this is one of them, how she fumbles here, and Heihei,
the comedy of all this really grew out of Chris' boards,
which were fabulous.
Alan Tudyk, wonderful gurgling there.
Drowned on the recording stage nearly.
And this tableau just gets a laugh,
the tableau gag which is in Chris' boards.
We were just trying to get his boards in the movie.
CLEMENTS: Alan Tudyk, the one voice actor in the movie who is not...
MUSKER: Of Polynesian descent.
Okay. Next stop, Maui.
MUSKER: Of course, Auli'i has a slight Hawaiian accent,
so there's certain words like "canoe" and "Maui"
that you can hear her accent, which we always loved.
We felt it gave her an island-y feeling in just a subtle way,
but we loved her accent.
CLEMENTS: Nicole Scherzinger, who played her mother, has the same accent
- when she wants to use it. - MUSKER: When she wants to.
These night scenes were a challenge
because we wanted her to be very isolated out at sea,
but not be so dark, you couldn't read it.
At times, these were so dark, we had to back off a little bit
because we're like, "Where is the boat? Where is she?"
And it got a little bit tough.
Although we did really want to present her with an enormous problem here.
This wasn't in some of the earlier drafts,
but we really felt like really making it hard for her.
She isn't a capable sailor when she starts out
so that she's got somewhere to go.
So, literally, I think this is a very compelling moment here.
CLEMENTS: One of the earlier ones animated as well.
MUSKER: This is one of the first sequences. Very, very early.
CLEMENTS: Effects had so much to have to deal with in this movie,
Effects animation.
MUSKER: We saw stars when we were in the Pacific Islands
and lightning crashing around the sky,
and we wanted to capture some of the scale and scope
of what we felt in the islands in this sequence.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, the skies seem darker,
the stars seem brighter,
and the lightning is incredible.
- It's so visceral. - MUSKER: Yeah.
We really wanted to put the audience in her shoes,
so these points of view really suggest, trying to get you caught up with her.
Boarded this way, but I think Jeff Draheim, our wonderful editor...
CLEMENTS: Jeff is the best.
MUSKER: ...really helped construct that ending
and many other points in the movie,
where he really was one of the storytellers on the movie
along with Jared Bush and Chris and Don and Dave and John,
and all those guys and Pam.
Really, Jeff was a key player
and his editing really did so much for this.
Chris, this was my idea to make her all... I just love...
I wanted to get a visual joke of some kind here.
It's a nightmare in CG, though, to do her hair like this.
They have to re-rig the hair, and it isn't meant to go this way.
So, we were like, "Please just give her weird hair here."
CLEMENTS: And the sand is gone, which was...
- MUSKER: Yeah. - You didn't notice how quickly she...
MUSKER: Zubin brushed off the sand there, our effects animator,
got the sand off in time for this thing to happen.
Again, I think this went back to some of Chris' boards here,
where she interacted with the water this way,
and she's sort of upset.
We had all sorts of different things in the script
for how the ocean would bring her to this island.
Sometimes it was very direct, sometimes it was more indirect.
This was a bit of a mixture of both.
And now we're coming toward
the introduction of one certain demigod.
One kind of superhero,
of both the Polynesian world and one of show business as well.
CLEMENTS: I love that water scene. That's one of my favorite water scenes.
MUSKER: And so, here, you have Kira Lehtomaki,
who's a supervisor on some of the other movies,
did a short stint on our movie.
But this is one of the scenes Kira got to animate,
did a fabulous job of her rehearsing her lines,
this kind of theatricality of it, but uncertainty.
Really wonderful bit of acting in here with what Kira did.
CLEMENTS: And the introduction of our demigod, Maui.
And who better to voice a demigod than, of course...
MUSKER: Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, the man himself, who...
Of course, this character, we always thought of him...
He's a real figure in Polynesian mythology,
shapeshifter, bigger than life, had the magical fishhook.
Our original versions of him had him bald.
And then we got pushback from our Tahitian advisors.
"He's gotta have a big head of hair," so we gave him that,
but it created a bit of a nightmare for the animation,
the technical animation.
CLEMENTS: And this introduction of Maui,
there were probably about 10 different versions
of the introduction of Maui.
This was storyboarded by Don Hall.
MUSKER: There were earlier ones by Dave Pimentel.
We had written some, or there were some that were written...
CLEMENTS: Ryan Green did some.
MUSKER: ...where he was almost borderline amnesiac,
and he was so covered in moss, and leaves, he looked like an animal.
And you couldn't tell if he was an animal or a person.
And we really struggled for a long time,
although it helped once we moved that prologue to the beginning
and he became a little bit more of a villain,
that it enabled him almost now
to sing this song he's about to sing,
where he can say, "In fact, you got it all wrong.
"And I'm a good guy
"and don't you know all the amazing things",
which enables us to tell the audience all these things that Maui did,
which are part of his folklore,
but we wanted to work it in for a western audience.
CLEMENTS: It was always a plan that he would have a song,
but it took a while to get to this idea.
MUSKER: Right, it was Lin's concept.
He said, "No, it should be called You're Welcome.
"He's just thanking everybody for all the great things he did."
Kind of a mock brag.
Once we got to this point
where Maui was a little bit more villainous at the beginning,
and he had to show, "Hey, I'm a good guy, "
Lin ran with it so fast and recorded it.
The first demo we heard of this was Lin himself.
And of course there's a big rap section in the middle,
which was a tour de force for Lin
'cause he's so good at that kind of stuff.
CLEMENTS: And there was always confidence
that Dwayne Johnson would be good at singing this song.
And he was eager to do this song.
And he did a great job.
MUSKER: The great Mack Kablan, our animation supervisor on Maui,
and helped really pull all this stuff together
and did some of the scenes during this song. Amazing animation.
And you saw a little glimpse of Mini Maui there,
who came along as the story developed,
animated by Eric Goldberg.
It was a wonderful device to undercut the pomposity of the character,
that he could have this conscience that would say, "Hey, wait a minute, "
and actually took more of a liking to Moana.
So, in a way, there were three characters in this scene,
or four, if you count the ocean.
CLEMENTS: And real choreography going on in this song.
MUSKER: Yeah, again, Tiana did some great stuff
and Daniel Klug pulled things from this and Mack did...
CLEMENTS: And a tour de force of hair.
The hair on this is amazing.
And this hair is hard to do. It's not easy.
As we say, Maui was once bald,
and it was a complication to the budget of the movie
- to give him this full hair. - MUSKER: Also, the necklace.
The necklace is very complicated
and the same people who did the hair
had to do all the little movements of the necklace,
which, at one point, we thought,
"We're not gonna be able to do it in the movie."
So, if you notice, he doesn't have a necklace in this scene.
We had him take off the necklace, and at one point,
he was never gonna get it back.
And then we really missed the necklace and we said, "Can't we?"
And it turned out the tech-anim people said,
- "No, we can do the necklace." - They figured out how to do it.
MUSKER: So, the next scene, when you see him on the boat,
he's got a necklace again
and he's gonna have a necklace for the rest of the movie.
Mark Henn's wonderful animation.
CLEMENTS: Great tattoo animation.
MUSKER: Mark Henn, one of the great 2D animators who worked...
Did stuff in this song.
And Randy Haycock did as well,
where these little things are moving on the tapa.
That's that background element.
Those are hand-drawn, hand animation.
CLEMENTS: There's a little bit of an influence,
particularly in what's coming up.
This is like Mary Poppins,
in that it combines CG animation
with a world of hand-drawn tapa animation.
This is tapa world.
MUSKER: ...the dimensional world laid over a flat world.
This is a shout out. Zach Parrish animated that scene.
And the gesture he did with that fruit rolling down his arm
was a callout to Aladdin,
where he did the same thing with an apple.
And he just said, "Did you notice my shout out?"
It was all Zach's idea.
Brilliant animator, funny animation, and cool to do the little shout out.
There's another little Easter egg there, we won't tell you,
but there was something that just happened there if you go back.
- CLEMENTS: Easter egg alert. - Look again.
CLEMENTS: But this was also one of the
earlier sequences to go into animation,
but it actually stayed in animation a long time
- 'cause that tapa world stuff was hard. - MUSKER: Yeah, tough to do.
And now, again, Chris Williams storyboarded this scene,
and this next scene where she runs to the boat.
And it was really a key scene in getting the relationship
between Maui and Moana,
how they would ricochet against each other...
CLEMENTS: And a fun interaction with the tattoo here.
MUSKER: Yeah, Eric Goldberg's animation there.
CLEMENTS: This was actually some of the first tattoo animation.
MUSKER: Yeah, Justin Weber did the CG Maui,
and then Eric Goldberg did the 2D version here,
and, you know, a great combination of both forms.
A little bit of an aside,
straight to camera
we don't do that very often, but we thought it was in the board,
so, it was funny, and we stayed with it.
- We had a tough time with this statue. - (CLEMENTS LAUGHS)
MUSKER: This is a statue of Maui,
and there were various times where people said,
"That statue looks wrong somehow."
There were design issues for us.
That kept getting redone many times until we arrived at this version
and we're happy with the way it ultimately came out.
And a little nose on the nose here.
It's on the nose, I guess. That was the problem.
Daniel Peixe animated this scene, one of my favorites.
He did a lot of fun scenes.
This one where he... Daniel did this as well.
Young, Spanish animator, very talented, super guy,
and can do 2D, as well as CG animation.
And, Heihei, one of the big laughs in the movie, I think, is his...
CLEMENTS: Some of it is just Maui's look, that incredulous look...
MUSKER: Yeah, Daniel did this whole...
- Can a chicken possibly be that stupid? - MUSKER: Right.
I love the athletic way she gets out here.
It really was part of her character, the way she could be so athletic.
We designed her, so that she could do things like this,
and it made her different than the other princesses
and it just felt right for the physical demands
'cause she is an action/adventure hero.
CLEMENTS: Once again, this was some of the first animation done
and we added some athletic stuff earlier in the movie to set this up.
No! Stop!
MUSKER: Yes, there is a line that isn't there anymore about...
- CLEMENTS: Don't bring that up. - We had a lot of different gag-lines
that we tried to preview, we had a line for the preview.
And we previewed it in Arizona,
when the movie was nearly done,
that died a thousand deaths, and so, that line went away.
CLEMENTS: And everyone cheered...
MUSKER: Everyone here cheered that didn't like the line.
People in the audience, they didn't know what they were missing.
But it works better without that line now.
But all this back and forth was really set up in Chris' boards,
but the animators' wonderful job
with the way they played one off the other,
just the comedy of this...
Mario Furmanczyk did some scenes, Val Amador, Shaofu Zhang,
Justin Sklar, really good stuff here.
- And Michael Woodside... - CLEMENTS: Yeah.
And that's a fun scene...
MUSKER: Of course, we had this nightmare
of all these scenes of the boat on the water.
They really had to, in effect,
animate the boat first 'cause the ocean's moving.
CLEMENTS: That's a great scene there.
MUSKER: Yeah, Mario Furmanczyk did this whole set piece here.
And just the expressions are so great.
He did this as well, with the falling over and conking out,
and Darrin Butters takes over here where he swims.
CLEMENTS: A lot of animators worked on this movie.
Ninety animators. We've never worked with that many animators.
MUSKER: You can see the amazing textures in this, too,
and her outfit is wet, it's dry, it was just a big nightmare.
But to keep track of it, just from a continuity point of view,
as well as, they had to develop simulations,
so the hair would move differently when it was wet
than when it was dry...
Her costume would move differently wet and dry.
And it was a never-ending battle that way.
Get it away from me.
MUSKER: We really wanted to sell the idea that he was afraid of this.
I think John had a question about this, so, we added a little scene there,
where he kind of shrank back from this just to make it more explicit
that he was afraid of this because of what had happened in the past,
and now, we're seguing into one of our action set pieces.
CLEMENTS: Big set piece. MUSKER: Yeah.
- CLEMENTS: Big, big action set piece. - Actually, these guys coming up.
CLEMENTS: Yeah.
MUSKER: The nefarious Kakamora,
which were actually brought into the story by the writers,
Aaron and Jordan Kandell who are from Hawaii.
Twin brothers who eat off each other's plates.
It's really horrifying to look at.
They order lunch, halfway through lunch,
they exchange plates,
and they eat the rest off the other person's plate.
I have twin sons, they never did that in their life.
These guys, I don't know what it is.
CLEMENTS: But they did come up with this idea of bringing in the Kakamora.
MUSKER: Based a little bit on the Menehune from Hawaii.
- CLEMENTS: Which they know well. - They know well.
But we didn't want this to be grounded in Hawaii,
so, they found the Kakamora,
which are, sort of, the equivalent of the Menehune
in the Solomon Islands, I think, from further out in the Pacific.
And they are mischievous, they do tricky things,
and so, we thought, could they be our adversaries,
these scavenger pirates?
And John Ripa storyboarded this sequence,
did a masterpiece, all the staging of what you're seeing.
This high-octane stuff came from John Ripa,
who's doing an homage to a certain genre
of action-adventure movies.
Sometimes, they're set in a post-apocalyptic world
with some barren landscapes and tattooed people...
- CLEMENTS: It's a homage. - Just speaking generally.
CLEMENTS: If there happened to be a movie that came out around the time
that John was boarding this sequence and he was influenced by that...
- MUSKER: Yeah, I mean, he was very... - ...so be it.
MUSKER: John channeled so much of his own furiosity into this.
I think that he got it on the screen here.
Of course, a little gag with Heihei.
We were always looking for things
with Heihei in the midst of this stuff.
And even the idea of Heihei being stupid,
- enabled us to make him swallow this... - CLEMENTS: It added a really...
This whole sequence was done without Heihei swallowing...
- MUSKER: Yeah, initially, it wasn't. - ...the heart.
- MUSKER: Right. - And then
that was one of the ideas that saved Heihei,
kept him in the movie, was the idea that,
"What if he actually did swallow the heart?"
MUSKER: And Mehrdad Isvandi,
a great Persian, visual development artist
really helped create this island along with Ian Gooding
and Andy and all the environmental people who had to build this thing,
and all the last details, Brien Hindman and various people.
It was amazing.
But I love the richness of the detail
of this floating barge that these guys are on.
Yasser Hamed supervised all our crowds in the movie.
We've got thousands of those crazy Kakamora.
And actually, they were deliberately designed
to actually be easier in production...
If you open those coconuts, there's nothing in there,
they didn't build faces for them...
CLEMENTS: We don't even know what's in there.
MUSKER: Yeah, because we didn't have the money to finish them off.
So, we said, "Let's..."
I think Brian Kesinger, the story artist, came up with the idea,
"Put them in coconut armor and you'll never have to see them."
CLEMENTS: But this idea of Heihei eating the heart
that actually saved the chicken, kept him in the movie,
and everyone celebrated by having a chicken lunch.
MUSKER: So, Maui gets to do a signature move here
that Moana is gonna learn from
and actually use in the climax of the film
when she's battling Te Kā.
And it was a cool call back,
that she could watch Maui do something here,
and then she gets proficient enough later, where she can do the move.
MOANA: You're turning?
MUSKER: John, I think, at one point even...
I think, John really had the idea that she should,
John Ripa, jump back on this barge.
So, we could really do some land bound...
Get her off a boat for once...
She's on a boat, but it's a little bit more land locked
action-adventure here where she gets to smack these guys around.
It was really fun to let her rip.
And, hey, there's another Easter egg in there that we won't mention,
but look closely at that scene and see if you can find anything.
But, yeah, this was cool just seeing her
at her badass best here, so...
CLEMENTS: Fun to have her beat up coconuts.
MUSKER: She was a badass princess.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, it's a great way for her to use her oar.
MUSKER: And, yeah, (CHUCKLES) Minor Gaytan animated this.
Great. This little bit here with the guy falling over,
the guy getting darted.
Great comic timing and wonderful animator.
And here they come. Zach Parrish, take it away.
- CLEMENTS: Yeah, yeah, this is a... - She circles and yeah...
A set piece and then Chris Cordingley takes over from here and...
I just love the choreography that John really worked out,
and Jeff Draheim with his editing
really, in terms of his timing on this as well,
it made it a great climactic moment, except, "Well, now what?"
A thousand throbbing people. We did, you know...
Mark Mancina on the score, he had a huge drum
that was like 16 feet high, or something like that,
for these big, massive drumming scenes
that was the big bass drum that underscored the low-end of all this.
- So much for the Kakamora. - CLEMENTS: Great, great sequence.
MUSKER: And, again,
Rob Dressel and his layout team,
they did an unbelievable job at making all that clear.
It's a very tough thing to make all that read.
CLEMENTS: But with animation, it's like a relay race.
Each animator does his one little bit, and yet, it all flows seamlessly
that you wouldn't realize how many animators did that
- and how quickly it was done. - MUSKER: Yeah.
So, of course, we've had this little action set piece,
so, now we're calming things down,
the camera's more still, the scenes are little longer,
the horizon is more parallel to the edge of the screen.
Yeah, things are a little more stable here...
And, basically, he's refusing to go along,
and she's really gonna have to...
Really, it was fun because now, Moana's really gotta find
how can she possibly talk this guy into doing it,
who doesn't wanna do it, totally reluctant guy.
And wonderful animation as you see her processing...
And we had to come up with a bit that I think,
as I recall, I think, was Auli'i's improv
when we have the cheering, you know, where she says, "You're so amazing!"
I think that was her adlib,
she was just supposed to do the, "Moana, Moana."
But I think she threw that in.
And great comedy instincts from a 15-year-old girl.
How can she do this? She's just superhuman. I don't know.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, she could improv, she could sing,
she could do everything.
Lot of thought went into the time of day through this movie
particularly with all these scenes on the water.
No one ever notices, or pays attention, but...
Another of my favorite scenes of the ocean.
MUSKER: Yeah, just a little headshake now.
CLEMENTS: But the subtle ways we go from morning to afternoon,
and now, we're starting into late in the day.
MUSKER: Mark Henn's animation, 2D animation here,
wonderful timing on this,
but this is the scene I was alluding to, where she does,
"You're so amazing!"
That was Auli'i's improv, which was fabulous.
And now, Hyun Min does this great animation of her
as she strikes this bargain. Wonderful animator,
key scenes of Moana were animated by Hyun Min.
Demigod of the wind and sea.
Hero to...
MUSKER: Both characters here are sizing her up,
"Should I go with this, or not?"
And it helped again to have Mini Maui be the audience.
"Come on, shake, buddy. Why don't you shake it?"
It really warmed Maui up, it redeemed him a little bit more.
Chris Williams, I think that was his bit in terms of the under...
Maybe Jared's. I can't remember.
This gesture that they're doing is based on real navigation.
We saw it earlier in the We Know The Way thing,
where you put one thumb on the horizon
and you touch the star with your index finger,
and it's a way of measuring distance that helps you navigate.
And we tried to incorporate some traditional navigational,
but old-school navigational methods.
CLEMENTS: Once again, we tried...
MUSKER: This bowline knot, John Lasseter, crazy...
He had seen a guy tie this knot and he had it on his cellphone,
and said, "You got to get it in the movie."
He showed it on his cellphone, so we had the animator...
"Look at John Lasseter's cellphone.
"See the way the guy's tying this knot? Do that in the movie."
CLEMENTS: And for a while, we lost the cellphone scene,
so, we had to get it back.
It's not just sails and knots...
it's seeing where you're going in your mind.
Really, this does go through some of the basic ideas
of dead reckoning, which is how you sail with no instruments
just by studying the stars and the currents.
MUSKER: This line coming up, Jared Bush's line...
CLEMENTS: Oh, yes.
MUSKER: We got more comments about this line
than any other line in the movie.
I think it was Jared's line.
There was another line in there for the preview
that had to do with dresses that didn't play all that well,
so, this actually came very late after the preview.
- He rewrote it and... - CLEMENTS: Same idea.
MUSKER: Same idea, but a funnier version of it, and one that lands better.
And it really kills in the screening,
as does this sequence generally, just with him being darted,
and, of course, the slight bathroom humor that's coming up.
We, of course, shy away from bathroom humor wherever we can,
but occasionally, we...
CLEMENTS: We actually had a little more bathroom humor
and we took some of it out.
We kept the best of the bathroom humor,
but this is probably the best of all.
MUSKER: So, it's fun, basically,
this made it easier for him to let her sail the boat,
the fact that he was incapacitated.
It was a way of using a plot device to help sell a character point.
'Cause it seemed like, in many cases, he just wouldn't let her do it
but he's really forced to do this, so, it helped.
And, of course, this joke, one of the biggest laughs in the movie.
Wait, it's getting warmer. (GASPS)
Aah! That is disgusting! What is wrong with you?
(MAUI CHUCKLES)
MUSKER: And this scene went different places.
This is a little dream sequence.
CLEMENTS: John Ripa storyboarded this.
It was in the movie in different places.
- We moved it around... - MUSKER: Yeah, we were trying...
It was always designed to keep the threat of what...
Te Kā's threat to the original island, to keep that threat alive,
and we wanted that through the second act of the movie,
to still remind us,
"Wait a minute, there are stakes back on the home island."
But where it landed, it came in different spots,
and it served different things and it ultimately moved back to...
CLEMENTS: I think it started where...
- I started here... - MUSKER: Right.
CLEMENTS: ...and then it moved to other places,
and finally, it ended up back where it started. Which happens.
MUSKER: Again, this ash, wonderful set piece from our effects department
Marlon and Dale.
Yeah, Blair Pierpont was involved in developing some of this.
And Yorie animated that last shot, fabulous job.
MAUI: Enjoy your beauty rest?
MUSKER: And now, we come up to the impossible cliff.
We always knew we wanted a sequence
in the Polynesian undersea world...
And it happened in various different ways
throughout many iterations of the story.
CLEMENTS: There was always a cliff jump.
MUSKER: And there was always a sequence
that took place under the sea,
at the sea floor, in this alternate world, and some of them involve spirits,
earlier ones, we went away from that idea.
MAUI: Trust me, my hook is the coolest collectible.
And he lives up there?
CLEMENTS: We searched a lot,
and there were a lot of different places under the ocean,
but there is a realm of monsters and demons.
We found that in our research and that's where they go.
MUSKER: Yeah, and early drawings... This is basalt rock.
Ian is the geologist around here, he knows how this really works,
but it's based on real geo forms.
And there is an island that has a very severe shape
that I can't remember the name of in,
I think, near New Zealand somewhere, but Ian will correct me later, say,
"No, you're completely wrong."
I know she's human, but that's not the...
MUSKER: This joke was in and out, the whole thing of, where he says,
"Hey, come on, don't you get it's a joke? It's funny."
It was gone for a while, I'm glad it's back in.
CLEMENTS: It was mostly gone because of length.
We have big problems with length
with probably every movie we've ever done.
It's like, it's too long, it's way too long...
It's like, you got to cut stuff, you got to cut stuff,
you got to get it shorter, but finally,
things sort of end up the way they should.
MUSKER: Don Hall... This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie,
where she looks down.
I don't know why... Justin Weber's animation.
- CLEMENTS: I love that scene. - Great shot.
Don Hall storyboarded this and he really...
It really became... It wasn't just a continuity scene.
It really became a character thing
and it really developed their relationship.
It was visual, it was fun,
and it was really a neat landscape to play this out against,
where it's just elemental, just these two guys and a pile of rocks.
CLEMENTS: And Jared wrote some really good dialogue here.
MUSKER: Jared's construction of this is fabulous.
CLEMENTS: And this is part of what makes you question the ocean,
which is important...
MUSKER: And to get in Moana's head, "Am I really this one, or not?"
Like, to give her these moments, where she looks like,
"I think I'm this. Am I really this?"
- CLEMENTS: There's little bit of doubt. - There's doubt.
CLEMENTS: Doubt creeps in from time to time.
MUSKER: And, of course, as she walks across here,
Jared wrote this line that Maui says, one of his funniest lines...
She looks out and looks like perhaps she's gonna sing...
If you start singing, I'm gonna throw up.
MUSKER: Yeah. And wonderful delivery by Dwayne.
Dwayne was great with all the comedy,
he improvised, and he was just a joy to work with.
We often recorded him, we had to go to him.
We had to go to Florida we had to go to Boston,
wherever he was shooting a movie. Atlanta...
CLEMENTS: He did about three or four movies
in the course of doing this movie and a TV show as well.
MUSKER: I thought you were gonna say
in the course of this commentary.
CLEMENTS: Well, probably, he has.
But he also did a TV show. Ballers was goin' on,
along with Fast & Furious...
MAUI: Don't worry...
MUSKER: We had a young New Zealand guy,
who taught us all haka.
Our own personal haka that we did at our...
We learned the All Blacks haka as well,
but then, he gave us our own,
which people performed at the wrap party,
and sort, of tied the movie...
And it's a great physical... It just channels all your mana.
And now, here we go,
off into the realm of the underworld.
And Amanda Wagner's animation as we go down here.
And this spiraling thing, Ian Coony designed the spiral of...
CLEMENTS: But the idea of another world beneath the ocean
- comes from a mythology... - MUSKER: Right.
CLEMENTS: And we felt like we gotta have that.
MUSKER: Right.
And, Ian, early on, Ian Gooding, our production designer,
had put together a whole library of undersea life
that has this amazing florescence
down at the bottom of the sea.
It's some of the most colorful sea life you could find,
and we said, "We gotta get it in the movie, "
so we really played it up in this sequence.
It really is keyed so beautifully and amazingly.
That goes back to Ian's original thoughts.
And Andy Harkness' color keys
based on what Ian was doing through a lot of this.
There was a song that appeared here at one point
called Warrior Face, which you're gonna hear
on our deleted scenes.
It was right in this area, but we felt that
it may have bonded them almost too early,
and we wanted to keep them at odds longer.
And we thought the Tamatoa thing... Actually, giving Tamatoa a song.
I think it might have been Jared's idea, I can't remember,
but it just seemed like it was better
to hold off something bonding between the two of them for later on.
CLEMENTS: So, that's actually, well, maybe, an Easter egg reference.
But there are a couple of Easter eggs references here.
MUSKER: Here's an Easter egg. Here. We won't tell you.
Who do you think's behind that mask?
We won't tell you, but keep guessing.
He was in one of the recent movies. We'll give you that much.
CLEMENTS: It wasn't really done to be an Easter egg,
it was done 'cause we were running out of characters...
- MUSKER: Assets. - ...that we could design and rig.
- It's complicated. - MUSKER: We had to reuse some.
Maui's fishhook!
MUSKER: Yeah, again, Chris Williams' boards.
Allen Ostergar's animation.
Auli'i's hilarious delivery, and Dwayne's as well.
We get to play up hair here.
CLEMENTS: We're getting here now into
some of the very last stuff animated in the movie.
We've seen some of the early stuff.
This was probably the last sequence animated.
MUSKER: The last sequence.
It took probably the last three weeks of production.
Most of the movie was animated in six to eight months,
which on a hand-drawn schedule, seems impossible,
I don't know, but we had so many animators, they were so great.
And, CG? I don't know if that was part of it,
but somehow we got it done, they got it done.
But this was one of the last things animated.
CLEMENTS: It's hard to believe, but this sequence was probably animated,
the bulk of it, in a couple of weeks.
MUSKER: Yeah, two to three weeks basically, most of this.
Wonderful job, Benson Shum, with these scenes.
CLEMENTS: At least half the staff worked on this sequence
'cause it was right at the end.
MUSKER: And the look here is so great.
The look, what the environmental people did with this shell.
And all the design... We really wanted him to...
There's a song coming up, Shiny, so, certainly it had to be...
We wanted it to be really spectacular looking.
He's all about bling, this crab,
and so, it was important to make him as blingy as possible.
And they found ways to just really go to town with this.
CLEMENTS: I mean, there was always...
Tamatoa was always pretty much in the movie, right from the beginning.
But he wasn't always a crab.
He started out as a headless warrior
based on some mythology that we read.
MUSKER: Yeah, and Taika gave him the name, Tamatoa,
which, I think, means "warrior" in various Pacific languages.
- CLEMENTS: But he evolved. - Yeah.
CLEMENTS: And Jemaine Clement really added...
MUSKER: Jared wrote this, but Jemaine worked around with this.
And the "Pick one, pick one, "
I think some of that was improv-ed by Jemaine.
But we loved the idea of Jemaine.
Jemaine actually went to school with Taika back in New Zealand.
He was a mate of his.
They, in fact, did a two-man show about Maui, years and years ago.
I think during college.
But his very deadpan, dry sense of humor
that you see on Flight of the Conchords,
we really wanted to channel that,
and in fact, once we said we wanted to do a song with him.
Lin, who was a fan of Flight of the Conchords, anyway,
went back and binge-watched them all over again.
And just said, "I've got an idea for the kind of song that the crab might sing."
That Jemaine... Might really work for him,
a very Conchords like song.
CLEMENTS: So, it was just like Dwayne's song
was written specifically for him,
this song was written specifically for Jemaine.
MUSKER: Right, and pretty much the last song written for the movie.
And we really looked at various videos of rock performances,
one performer in particular, who this is an homage to,
to really get some of the mannerisms and gestures
that we might mimic a bit.
And I think people know who I'm talking about.
Your granny lied
MUSKER: And the animators, really...
This is some of the broadest animation in the movie,
but it's sort of its own thing. It's its own animal, so to speak.
And they really had fun with the expressions, and trying to...
Jen Hager supervised this character,
and she really did an amazing job, I think,
of having fun with all the ways his mouth distorted,
the eyes worked independently.
The way he moves, it's choreographed like a dance...
It's all kind of silly in a good way, I think.
CLEMENTS: And if you study his shell carefully,
- there are Easter eggs. - MUSKER: Within his shell...
If you take a closer look.
Of course, Maui's fishhook.
We did want some comedy transformations in the movie.
Nathan Engelhardt's animation here.
But some of these go by so quickly,
we didn't have to rig the entire character.
We could just do it very simply.
So, it wasn't as complex as it might have been otherwise.
CLEMENTS: I think Chris Williams really wanted him to turn into a horse,
but we could not afford the horse.
MUSKER: Yeah, Chris was big on, "He's got to be a horse."
But we somehow didn't get the horse in.
CLEMENTS: We got a reindeer instead of a horse.
MUSKER: Jackie's animation of that scene
where the eye looks at the other eye.
Fantastic scene. Now, we are back into the song.
And manhandling Maui, it was fun, 'cause Lin said...
He thought of this as his answer to Les Poissons,
the song from Little Mermaid,
where there's a crab who gets sadistically manhandled by a guy.
Here's a scene where a demigod
gets sadistically manhandled by a crab.
It was turning it in reverse.
It was fun for him to do his own cock-eyed homage to Les Poissons.
I think Normand Lemay storyboarded this, did an amazing job.
He's nominated for an Annie for his work on this.
And this whole black light idea, I think, was his,
when the shell closes and suddenly, we go into a whole black light world.
It was really fun for the lighters and for us
to look at, "How can we stage this now, in this limited thing."
Joey Brown's funny animation on the strumming there.
Yeah, now we start to allude a little bit to Maui's backstory.
In earlier versions, we always had some allusions to
that there was more to Maui than met the eye
that we got into in this underworld.
And this was a good way of doing it within the song,
where we hint just slightly at it and it will be explained
much more thoroughly later.
In the meantime, we just beat Maui up as much as possible.
CLEMENTS: We wanted this to be painful.
MUSKER: It's kind of like a prizefight that he's losing.
And we had different versions.
But we liked the idea of really reducing him,
really having him on the short end, of making him more vulnerable.
CLEMENTS: You noticed Tamatoa's eyes are different colors?
MUSKER: Yes, that's a little homage to a certain rock and roll persona.
- MOANA: Hey! - Huh?
I got something shiny for ya!
MUSKER: These are some adlibs of Jemaine, I think.
You can't run from me!
Oh, you can. You keep surprising me.
MUSKER: Jemaine has a way of making the obvious seem funny.
(YELLS)
And so, now we really wanted to pull a reversal on the audience,
and yet, have them buy that she tricked the crab.
Just like the audience has been a little bit deceived by all this.
And put her in the driver seat, it's really her saving Maui.
It's fun to see her saving the supposed demigod.
That she's really got to pull him out.
It gives him a little more respect for her and it pulls them together more.
That she's the one that really rescues him from this jam.
CLEMENTS: That's probably one of the last scenes animated in the movie.
MUSKER: Yeah.
And these geysers we used there, they became a device
to get them both quickly up to the water's surface.
So that we didn't have to spend as much time doing that.
So much for Tamatoa.
And Jason Hand
storyboarded this scene coming up, the whole half-shark thing,
did hilarious drawings, very funny, that really,
this is one of the comic highlights within the middle of the movie.
Storyboard drawn by the artist, and then the animation, Abe Aguilar.
Hilarious, great animation. And Mack Kablan, very...
The more underplayed it was, the more funny it was, really.
CLEMENTS: Also, her reactions are really fun on this, too.
MUSKER: Yeah, and Nicolas, his animations as well.
Yeah, and Daniel Peixe did some of her reactions there.
Which are just... And Michael Klim, great work.
Look, the point is...
for a little girl, child, thing, whatever...
MUSKER: Yeah, just this incidental thing.
Yeah, I think that was Abe's animation, as I recall.
Yeah, just a really fun little detail...
CLEMENTS: Yeah, this was a fun scene, too...
MUSKER: Yeah.
Yeah.
And they had to model him... It's a question of "How did they do it?"
We saw some scenes, if you took that shark head away,
they actually took Maui, the rest of his body,
and shrunk it down really tiny, so you'd see, like,
a tiny little head of Maui underneath that shark head.
CLEMENTS: It was scary. They should put it out...
MUSKER: You don't wanna see what's really underneath that.
CLEMENTS: They are some of the scariest outtakes I've ever seen.
- MUSKER: I was very disturbed. - Yeah, some of the movies...
Hand-drawn films don't get that scary when things go wrong.
MUSKER: Yeah.
Again, it was fun to do a comic visual
set piece like this in the middle, and now, we...
This scene starts joke-y and then it's gonna turn more serious.
- It's a bonding sort of scene. - CLEMENTS: It's another John Ripa...
MUSKER: Yeah, John Ripa did such an amazing job of the boards on this.
And Bert Klein, very funny animation coming up here, with this...
Multi-creatures.
And, of course, Maui,
you see his hair's tied up in his man bun.
I've seen comments on this.
People really liked that in her as well.
That was driven at least in part by production issues where,
it became easier to animate the hair if it was tied up.
But it really is true to the culture, too.
So, a lot of girls I've seen, really relate to the idea
that she would tie up her hair.
Auli'i used to do that during the recording sessions,
if it got in her way, very effortlessly did that.
So, it was fun doing it with her and him as well.
- CLEMENTS: Within seconds. - Yeah.
And all these tattoos on his body, Mac George designed these tattoos.
Bill Schwab had a hand in it.
We wanted them to tell a story,
they are based on Marquesan and other real tattoos.
And this one is, sort of, the key one,
that really tells the backstory of his whole...
CLEMENTS: This is based on real mythology.
This backstory of Maui.
There are many different versions of the Maui stories.
Which we found out that
every island has their own version of the Maui stories.
And many islands think that they're unique.
That he, Maui, totally belongs to them.
But, really, he's a demigod,
and his stories are told throughout the Pacific Islands.
MUSKER: Again, we tried to thread the ocean through some of these shots
so that the ocean is still alive, but a bit in the background.
But now, comes this really intimate scene
where she lets down her guard, he lets down his guard.
It's really a crucial scene for pulling the two of them together.
Wonderful acting, Andrew Lawson, here in this shot, the animator.
And they really had to dig into the acting on this, on both characters.
Maui really isn't doing much on his scenes.
He's nearly immobile on a lot of these shots.
But it was really important to get his thought process,
and the emotion in these scenes. And they did a terrific job.
As well as the lighting, Chris Springfield was involved
in getting all these scenes lit.
And really making them feel like they reflect the mood,
this somber mood.
And yet, some warmth in the sky 'cause it's a warm, yet somber scene.
So, they found, I think, just the right color palette for this.
CLEMENTS: It still surprises me that some people find it hard to understand
that animators are primarily actors. They are really good actors.
And the animators we had on this movie were excellent actors.
And along with all the technical knowledge they have to have,
primarily, they have to be able to act.
MAUI: They gave me the hook.
They made me...
Maui.
MUSKER: Yeah, and Dwayne's delivery on this sequence was so great.
We had to record it a couple of times
just because there were some little rewrites here and there,
but every time he did it,
he just got so much into the heart of this.
And I'd seen Dwayne do some stuff even on his TV show, Ballers,
that I thought was really sensitively acted,
I think he's a really good actor, though he doesn't get credit for it.
And then a lot of the movies don't really demand much of him, I think.
He's capable of it all.
CLEMENTS: They don't demand a lot of sensitive acting.
- They demand a lot of action, heroic... - MUSKER: Others kills...
But I'm more happy that we had
both the action-y stuff and these subtle things.
Jeff Engel did this long, long scene. One of the last to be...
CLEMENTS: This is the longest scene in the movie, actually.
MUSKER: This is the longest, this might be 40 seconds long.
And it's just the two of them, and it all relies on the acting.
And all the little subtle eye darts,
and he opens his mouth and he thinks...
For any of you animation students out there,
you could really look at this scene of him and his...
It's just a marvel, and just understated reaction, and process...
CLEMENTS: He's not saying anything, he's just thinking.
MUSKER: Yeah.
CLEMENTS: That's just trying to show the audience...
MUSKER: Of course, we had to distort his anatomy there a little bit,
so you could get the feeling that he would hug, so...
A great team of people really conspired to,
"How do we make that skin move?"
I think tech animation ultimately does that, where they deform his body.
Now, this, earlier, for a while,
had a different underscore cue behind it.
It was a reprise of the You're Welcome song.
But it sounded too brassy, like it didn't fit.
And I really felt like, this song that I knew,
which we had actually used as a scratch for...
For a trailer that we had, it's a Te Vaka song.
And we loved the spirit of this and the energy.
It's just so infectious,
that we said this would be a better backdrop for this montage-y sequence.
So, we reinstated this very late in the process.
And so, this is really...
CLEMENTS: This is one of the last sequences to be done as well.
MUSKER: But it's so bright, and so fun, and it's part of Opetaia's talent
that he can do the emotional stuff,
but then the light, fun stuff is just as great.
This is a great set piece by Opetaia and Mark...
CLEMENTS: And a lot of really fun animation in this stuff, too...
MUSKER: It's all visuals, story-telling...
CLEMENTS: The staging and the layouts...
MUSKER: It's fun to do a sequence where there is no dialogue,
and it really relies on the animation and the staging
to really put the ideas over, it's all got to be visually told.
The weight of this, and the wake, and the way the boat moves...
It's just, you take all this stuff for granted,
but somebody had to figure all that out. People way smarter than us.
CLEMENTS: And it's a fun idea here, to give the ocean a relationship
- with Heihei that we understand. - MUSKER: This was a gag that...
Once when they were saying,
"Let's get more of the ocean in the movie."
This is one of the things that was added, which was great.
And then John Lasseter really said, "Push, push, push."
Really make the ocean even more upset and furious.
And he really pushed us to go even broader with it,
which did make it funnier.
And this whole exchange of the oar, this is really a symbolic thing,
"Okay, you take over."
It really is a passing of the baton in their relationship.
And as I said, one point, it almost happened earlier, and it was too early.
This seemed like the right spot for this to happen.
CLEMENTS: Nice to get a happy scene here.
MUSKER: Wanted to get some warmth between them.
CLEMENTS: But things are going to turn fairly unhappy soon.
- And stay that way for a long time. - MUSKER: Yeah, basically...
The end of this shot, and the beginning of these next scenes,
is them at their warmest
because now, things are gonna...
Yeah, tension is gonna come back into the story.
But this, we wanted the maximum of their being pulled together.
Of course, we love the idea of fog,
and it was a way of being able to give the island of Te Fiti a reveal.
So, you don't see it at first.
It is a real part of the atmosphere,
and the Pacific fog is such a part of sailing.
It became a theatrical device for us, that we enjoyed using.
- CLEMENTS: Of course. - And the hair again...
The breeze through the hair, unbelievable.
CLEMENTS: And this scene was explaining something
that I think was always in the movie, but maybe not clear.
That the ocean has an agenda in this movie.
And that was based on something we heard in the South Pacific.
Which was that the ocean doesn't separate the islands,
it actually unites them almost like one continent.
So, the idea through the whole movie,
is that the ocean really wants to heal this problem,
so that the islands can all be united again.
And the ocean is actually supporting the migration.
MUSKER: It was Taika that named the island Te Fiti,
back in his earlier script.
And it actually means "The East," I think,
and it relates almost to Tahiti.
And we always thought that this was almost...
This is set in the story before Tahiti was ever discovered.
So, in some ways, Te Fiti is Tahiti, a little bit.
Lighting department always had to figure out
how bright and how dim to make this,
the heart of Te Fiti, 'cause it would pulse more
the closer it gets to the island.
I don't know if you're aware of that, but as you watch,
it gets brighter as they get closer to the island.
And neck wrench, courtesy of Chris Williams' storyboards here.
A wonderful personality idea to work into that beat.
And...
CLEMENTS: And this was done earlier, I think.
This is an effects kind of tour de force.
MUSKER: Yeah, it's amazing how complicated these shots are.
You take them for granted,
but there's smoke elements, there's fire elements,
there's ash elements.
There's Te Kā herself, who has several elements.
Including the dripping lava, and the cracks, and all that.
And then the fire for her hair, and the smoke and it just...
This was great to explore the lighting underwater here,
how this would work.
And using the heart of Te Fiti as a light source.
And trying to really choreograph this with the fire balls.
You know, when they happen,
and to get a sense of scale out on the open sea.
We really did, I think, get an epic scale
thanks to our great layout people, and board artists.
And the animators, effects animators,
got a wonderful sense of scale to these fire balls,
- and the ocean surface. - CLEMENTS: Fun hair stuff, too.
MUSKER: Yeah, climatic...
CLEMENTS: See the speed with the hair.
MUSKER: And just the emotional climax of this.
We struggled over that shot because,
for a long time, you couldn't see the hook there.
We were trying to make it look very elemental, very iconic.
In a general way, we just wanted a strong silhouette.
But it happened so fast, you didn't get it.
So, we had to go back and add more frames,
of the hook coming into position,
'cause you just couldn't read it well enough.
We got it finally to where it should be, I think.
And Chris Williams was big on pushing for that.
CLEMENTS: Once again, I feel like this is some really great acting.
MUSKER: It's sort of a companion scene to the other.
That was tricky, 'cause you have two acting scenes close together.
But we had that big set piece between them
and then the comic beat.
So, it felt like these were bridged a little bit by those things.
But very controlled acting throughout,
on both Moana, and on Maui.
Just with little looks, you know, back and forth.
Little edgy things.
And they designed this hook, this was another
slightly crazy nightmare, 'cause we had earlier versions
where the hook didn't look damaged enough,
I think we had to go back and kind of correct that.
So, it was clear that it really wasn't totally broken yet,
but it looked like another good shot
and the hook would be gone forever.
It was really a story point as much as anything.
We still have to restore the heart.
My hook is cracked.
One more hit, and it's over.
MUSKER: All those little scrimshaw, those little insignias on there,
Manuel Arenas, one of the visual development artists,
came up with those, actually, for another part of the underworld.
And I think it was Ian Gooding's idea to use a lot of those on the hook itself.
Which gives it just a feeling of a history,
that you're not aware of, like, "How did it get there?"
But it feels more ancient and more like it's a mythic object.
CLEMENTS: There is some great dialogue acting here
from both Dwayne and Auli'i.
But in this next part, I think Auli'i has a great little...
MUSKER: Yeah, Val Amador animated these shots...
And then Chad Sellers, who only did a few scenes in the movie,
did these shots, where she does the argument.
And he did a wonderful job of really getting into her head
and getting this emotion, capturing her emotion.
Some of Auli'i's best readings in the movie were here.
No matter what was rewritten, we wanted to keep this as it was,
these readings, 'cause they were so beautifully done.
CLEMENTS: But we did struggle with the eyes
and how teary to make the eyes.
- MUSKER: We went back and forth. - We went back and forth,
trying to get the right effect.
You take it for granted, but we did struggle.
MUSKER: And Mark Mancina's score here, did a wonderful job
of elevating the emotion, I think, in terms of
really letting it go big and operatic there.
And now it comes down quietly.
In the storyboards, they had this idea
that the water just comes up offstage.
I questioned it, I was like, "Will people be thrown by it?"
They said, "No, we'll just have a little play of light on her face."
And I wasn't sure, but I think it was the right choice.
It really is a magical moment, the way they did it.
- CLEMENTS: I always liked it. - I wasn't sure it would work.
But it did work well.
Just the kind of standoff between the two of them,
it's really an important scene, and it's...
It's a scene between her and water, and yet it's emotional.
I think that's a testament to the animators and everybody.
The lighting people and everybody, that they can make this feel...
CLEMENTS: And the idea that the ocean actually takes it away from her
- wasn't there early on. - MUSKER: Jared as well.
CLEMENTS: That was in a story meeting,
there was a discussion back and forth.
I remember when that idea came, "What if the ocean took it?"
And everybody's like, "Yeah."
MUSKER: So, we get to see bioluminescence again.
And this next shot coming up,
it is literally, I'd say, one of my three favorite shots in the movie.
I don't know, it's just so lyrical, so beautiful.
Manuel's animation here,
but the wonderful effects, animation, Blair and the team.
I just think it's a magical scene.
CLEMENTS: Lot of experimentation, how to handle the ghost, Tala.
MUSKER: Yeah, exploring different techniques...
CLEMENTS: I like the way it ended up.
MUSKER: 'Cause she's meant to have passed on.
CLEMENTS: She's solid, and yet, she's not solid.
MUSKER: Kind of evanescent, and enough that she can grab her
and make contact, and yet, she's kind of ethereal.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, it wouldn't have been as emotional,
if Moana had ran through her, and splashed in the water.
MUSKER: Pause for laughter. Still pausing.
I will be with you.
CLEMENTS AND MUSKER: And the tears.
MUSKER: James Mansfield did a lot of these tears, effects animator.
Peter DeMund actually did this one, I think, but...
We wanted her to have tears, but the tracks of her tears,
we really had to see where does she have tears,
where does she not have tears, how much do you see them.
There was a whole tear continuity that happened.
CLEMENTS: Beautiful storyboarding here by Dave Derrick.
We should mention him.
MUSKER: Absolutely one of the essential
storyboard artists on the movie.
Storyboarded How Far I'll Go, storyboarded this,
key moments of acting in the movie,
and this is such an anchor to the whole rest of the movie.
And Dave, we might mention, has Samoan heritage,
I think his great-grandfather was Samoan,
so, he really felt connected to the material.
And he really gave it his all,
all these scenes, with heart and emotion.
CLEMENTS: He was one person that was there all the time,
who really was always pushing hard
from the point of view of the islanders,
to be as truthful as possible.
MUSKER: Yeah, all the stuff with the tau'olunga and tuiga and all that.
A lot of that came from Dave really pushing the...
"Hey, these are real events in the islands."
And Dave did an earlier version of this sequence...
Which was equally beautiful, and I think it will be on the DVD.
...when this took place down in the underworld
and there were a circle of ancestors that came back down there.
It was one of the most powerful scenes in the movie,
but for various plot reasons,
it had to be amended and changed.
And we were always like,
"How can we get that emotion back into the movie?"
But I'm very happy with the way this resulted.
I still think it's one of the most emotional scenes...
CLEMENTS: A difficult song to write. It went through a lot of...
MUSKER: And Mark Mancina was really...
'Cause Opetaia took a tack at this.
And Lin was waiting to see what came out of that.
And, really, it was Mark that really created a shape
for this whole scene in a way.
By the way he found a fragment of what Opetaia's...
That whole Ye'Kina idea.
The idea that you can come back.
He roughed out an idea of how this might do.
So, Mark really structured this.
And then Lin worked on top of that,
and really created this wonderful and insightful lyric
for Gramma and for Moana.
And what she could speak that really...
It's her big empowerment moment here
that's gonna launch the whole third act of the movie.
CLEMENTS: I love that little moment
between her and her ancestor. That little connect.
MUSKER: In the boards of Dave's, and then,
Daniel Klug animated those shots and did a fantastic job.
And, again, the lighters, amazing job with how...
And the effects artists with how this all plays...
It's ethereal and magical...
CLEMENTS: It's hard to go into details, but believe me, this wasn't easy.
MUSKER: One of the lighter things we did actually.
This was towards the end of the movie that we animated this.
Malcon Pierce, who supervised Moana,
animated that shot. Great Malcon Pierce.
Great hand-drawn draftsman, as well as a 2D animator.
And he really wanted to do it, so, he did a few shots in the movie.
And that's one of them. It's an absolutely key thing.
And I love the primalness of this
and the way the music comes up and the structure of this...
I really felt like the idea of coming up to the empty sea,
everything's gone.
It would just be a powerful storytelling moment.
Like the spell has broken, and now, did that all happen in her head?
But she's so strong here,
leading into Act Three, basically...
We get this pantomime thing with a voiceover. Again, John Ripa's boards.
Jackie Koehler did some of this animation here. Fabulous job.
Wonderful tech anim throughout this.
MOANA: I will sail across the sea...
CLEMENTS: Once again, this stuff was actually done,
most of this was done earlier.
Some of the early stuff done in the movie.
- Particularly when... - MUSKER: This was one of the
most challenging things,
trying to make this work as time passes.
'Cause we wanted this epic...
It wasn't gonna take place in the next 10 minutes.
We really wanted to get a feeling of voyaging,
so the movement of the clouds and how those can work.
We went back and forth.
Many, many, many iterations of that shot.
I'd say that shot and the shot where she first walked into the cave
were the toughest shots from the layout point of view
to make work.
CLEMENTS: Score wise, it's one of my favorite parts of the score.
MUSKER: Yeah, there is an addition to...
Opetaia brought his group, Te Vaka,
about a dozen singers that sing background, those things...
There's additionally about 20-25 person choir
of Pasifika voices conducted by Igelese Ete.
It was recorded in Fiji.
And that really gives a lot of the power and the emotional heft to this.
What they added to this, sort of, the choral element of these cues
that Mark Mancina had written.
CLEMENTS: From this point on, almost till the end of the movie,
there's all score.
- Huge, huge score... - MUSKER: A tour de force from Mark...
CLEMENTS: ...which involves Mark and the Fiji choir.
MUSKER: Opetaia and Igelese...
And Opetaia came up with some of these chants on the spot
when they were doing the under-scorings,
like, "Why don't we try something like this?"
Mark would say, "I'd like something a little bit like this."
And Opetaia would just come up with things.
And it was a wonder to watch.
CLEMENTS: Dave Derrick boarded this...
MUSKER: Right, this climactic...
CLEMENTS: And this was some of the first Te Kā animation that was done.
MUSKER: Yeah, and so, character animators would really animate Te Kā,
but then, effects people would go back in, and all that,
the smoke and the fire and the lava would all be added over
what was blocked out originally by the character animators
who did a wonderful job with just these fireballs
and how they were thrown and all this...
A whole team of people did these,
and then, great effects.
Kee did that wonderful animation of all those rocks
and all that great stuff.
Heihei finally gets a moment to do something good in the movie.
CLEMENTS: One moment.
MUSKER: Stretches his level of intelligence slightly here,
but we felt like it was good to have him do something heroic
in the movie somewhere. Just one little thing.
Te Fiti.
CLEMENTS: These are some incredible scenes
animated by Zach Parrish.
I think he's one of the great animators among great animators.
He was one of our best.
(COUGHING)
MUSKER: Now, this was always tricky.
We wanted to misdirect,
so you feel that Te Fiti is still there, and yet, how can Te Fiti still be there?
So, the shell of these barrier islands
formed a silhouette that sort of looked like Te Fiti.
This was a tough scene, and actually, this was one of the few scenes
I felt like, if I had to go over this one,
I think they should've said something
a little bit more than they say here.
CLEMENTS: He used to and there was a question of, "Too much or too little?"
MUSKER: "Too much or too little?" It was one of the last things we did.
And I felt, we didn't quite get it right.
CLEMENTS: He used to say, "I talked it over with a buddy of mine."
And then looked at the... Whether or not it's clear or not,
basically, the reason he came back was his conscience.
The tattoo made him come back.
MUSKER: Yeah, I feel like it's not quite there.
I feel like we just didn't quite have enough time to work that out right.
Ryan Page did some of these sailing shots.
Again, he's a sailor, so, he was able to channel some...
He'd say, "You move this rope this way to do this.
"And you hold the sail this way to tack..." Yada, yada.
We don't know what we're talking about.
Of course, Joey Brown's fun animation of this dash off the hand.
MUSKER: I was concerned. Will this be too much for kids?
But it seems like most kids have...
A few kids are too scared,
but generally, they go with it,
and it helps in the way the movie resolves itself.
CLEMENTS: They realize Te Kā isn't so bad.
MUSKER: Right.
This got reworked a number of times to really try and make it such that,
ultimately, Moana would be the one
who'd have to save herself.
That it wasn't Maui that was gonna save her.
There are other endings, where she dove down to plant the heart.
And then Maui had to pull up an island and things,
but it put too much of the spotlight on Maui
and our producer kept saying, "No, no. That's too much Maui.
"You gotta have her in."
Pam as well. I think, various people said,
"No, no, it's gotta be her."
So, this got reworked many, many times.
CLEMENTS: Because it was part of the myth,
we always thought Maui should pull up the island...
MUSKER: An island somewhere.
CLEMENTS: But I think this is the right way to go.
MUSKER: Yeah, I believe it was John Ripa
who came up with the ultimate structure of,
at least in terms of her confronting Te Kā
with a hongi, in the passive way that she does it.
So, it's calming the savage beast way.
Which I think was really the perfect way
to resolve this, actually. And this was a challenging shot.
How do you put over the idea
that there's a form there?
And how much information to give the audience?
Someday, we should ask the audience.
"Did you get it?" I think they get it,
but it's like trying to put all this over relatively,
with very few little bits and pieces of dialogue
and trying to tell the story visually.
And have the audience put it together in a way
that they don't get ahead of it too much,
but they are with it when it happens.
Here, again, is a haka. This is a great...
We had reference done for us by Layne,
whose New Zealand heritage
came into play here as he really gave us
a library of gestures to use for this haka.
Matt Meyer's very subtle animation there, very cool.
And now, yeah, just a little glimmer of the stone
on the ground surface. I love just the subtlety of that.
And now, she's gonna come,
and it's kind of the "Red Sea parting moment."
But the idea of her having enough control of this
called back, in a way, to the opening of the movie.
This came around later in the development of the story...
Those are really a good way to...
CLEMENTS: It was always the idea
that there would be a way, possibly musically,
to resolve this whole thing.
It was a no-no to have a musical moment like this.
MUSKER: In the third act of a movie, it's very rare.
And we had different things that she was gonna possibly sing.
I think, it was Lin's idea, ultimately,
"What if we really have the background music she sings against, "
is that opening song, An Innocent Warrior,
because she is coming back to the ocean.
And this is an ocean-backed scene and that seemed like the perfect idea.
It came very late, though, and so, that was arranged.
And Lin wrote the counter-melody and counter-lyric
to that piece behind you.
I hope it's obvious, but just in case it is not,
basically, the reason...
One of the main reasons the ocean picked her
was witnessing that little act that she did with the turtle.
And the ocean knew
that she would do the right thing, at this moment, which was critical.
MUSKER: That whole scene with the turtle
grew out of a showing we had with Pixar,
where they really felt like,
"She should do something that warrants...
"That makes the ocean notice her."
And the idea of helping a turtle to the sea,
I think, was developed back then.
And that was really a crucial thing
that helped set this up in its own way.
Again there's a hongi, that's that gesture of intimacy and friendship.
And now, as this... Finally, Te Fiti...
This really was in the earliest versions of the story
that Te Fiti and Te Kā were one and the same.
And that we would reveal it here.
That she would go back to her better self.
This goes back to one of the earliest pitches,
but it was always a challenge, how do you make this work...
And even technically, this was a huge challenge.
How do you get enough scale on her,
so that she feels like a living island?
She's got to grow up from a scale
that's close to Moana, to a whole island scale,
which later, she gets even bigger still.
So, it was fun to do something that was so visual and mythic here.
And the orchestral score that Mark wrote,
carries so much of the emotion here, I think.
As well as the wonderful Larry Wu's department
- who made all this grow! Larry! - CLEMENTS: Larry!
MUSKER: Shout out to Larry Wu for making all that grow.
And the chicken. There he comes.
The chicken lives.
MUSKER: He had his moment.
So, there are different spots where this little speech,
where he says, "I'm still Maui."
At one point, he used to say this when he first came back,
and there was a discussion, "Should we have it there?
"Should we have it here? Should we have it at all?"
And it was fairly late that it was decided that it would be here
and Dean Wellins storyboarded this last bit between them,
did a wonderful job.
And the essence of this staging came from Dean's boards,
and then wonderful layout work beyond that.
(GASPS) Te Fiti!
MUSKER: I love this. This is Val Amador's animation,
and one of my favorite scenes in the movie right here.
I just think his expressions are so perfect on that shot.
And even that look
when she doesn't go along with him, that's Val's shot as well.
Those two scenes, those couple of scenes,
really just great stuff, I think.
And now, there's a little bit of redemption.
John Lasseter really pushed us to play him like the kid
who's offered cookies at the neighbor's house,
and he's not supposed to have them, or something.
That was like his brief on this.
When we were gonna do it, he really pushed it
to be kind of childish, child-like.
And that's what we gave the animators.
And they did a great job. David Stodolny...
"Stodolny," I don't say his name right.
In terms of just how over-eager he was, and all that in trying to get the hook.
And the majesty of this gesture and the idea of reinstating the boats
and using flowers, Ian Coony and his team really made that appear.
It was in the boards, but how do you really make that work?
CLEMENTS: Not only does Te Fiti have the power to create life,
she also has the power to create boats.
MUSKER: And now, she's growing in scale.
This was always a question. How do you put over
that she's going from being, whatever it is,
100-feet high to being a mile high, or however big she is?
And so, this was our...
It took a lot of doing,
but this was one of the very last things animated.
And we had to keep going back and forth.
Slowing down the animation in some cases
'cause it didn't have enough scale.
It seemed, when you put the tech animation,
it killed the scale and she felt too little.
So, we had to reanimate some things slower and slower.
Andrew Feliciano did this goodbye scene.
He's the animator. Great job with this stuff.
And the looks between them and the emotion...
This scene of Andrew's, is one of my favorites.
CLEMENTS: There used to be more dialogue between the two of them.
MUSKER: There was. This one, there were many, many variations...
- CLEMENTS: We just simplified it. - Yeah, pared it down.
Jared really wanted it to be simple, I think.
And this is Jared's construction.
- CLEMENTS: Love this scene. - Yeah, Shawn Clark's animation,
and then the effects, really...
We were trying to get fireworks.
A little bit of a Bellagio effect there.
And, really wonderful.
I think he did the animation of the water in that shot.
Fantastic shot.
Now, we're gonna segue back, life comes back.
Like, "Larry makes the flowers grow," and they grow again.
And...
Again, there's not a whole lot of dialogue coming up.
It really is visual storytelling.
It was in the boards, great job on the boards.
CLEMENTS: I don't know if we've said enough
about lighting with Adolph Lusinsky.
But the lighting throughout the movie, they just did such a great job.
MUSKER: Yeah, when you talk about the beauty of the movie,
it was both Ian and Adolph.
Their eye for color and the whole team.
The lighting team... There were 70 lighters.
And they were all amazing people. Too numerous to name...
CLEMENTS: Some people may feel like
it's kind of a realistic movie, but it's not as realistic as it looks.
It's very much heightened... It's a heightened reality that...
It's more trying to capture the feeling you have
when you're on those islands.
It's not literal, but more trying to capture
the feeling that you get.
MUSKER: And finally, Pua gets to come back in the movie.
- We've been waiting for you. - CLEMENTS: Yay for Pua.
MUSKER: You didn't get to go on the boat, but now you're here.
And Heihei, a funny send off. Adam Green's animation here.
I love the translucence... I can't remember if Brett did that.
But the refractions of his big eyes, and the bubbles.
And here they are, pulling out the boat.
This, really, I think, is kind of a cool mythic thing,
and it went through very many permutations, but I like this version.
CLEMENTS: And the music, right, this was a great piece.
MUSKER: Yeah, so, Opetaia really added this chant very late
in the scoring stage.
He invented some of this chant stuff at Mark's direction.
And, really, it gives so much emotion back to the movie.
And for it to be in a Pacific Island language,
and it really pulls you into the ocean.
And I think this was John Ripa's idea
to put the sea shell on the top of the rocks.
But I think it's a perfect little story, be it to say...
She's going to take charge, but in her own way,
and connect it to the ocean once again.
Works visually, and it works from the story point of view.
And, now, this last...
This reprise of We Know The Way, we had it longer, we had it shorter,
we had her singing on it for a while, we had other people sing.
Ultimately, we decided
no one on stage should really be singing this, just choral,
and it really celebrates her now being at the front of the boat.
We really wanted her...
How can we get her into position near the front of the boat
at the end of the movie.
So, Dave Derrick, I think, storyboarded this.
Did an amazing job.
And, of course, we like the shout out to Gramma
that was in the lyric here, again, once again.
And, really, to tie it up, Zach Parrish animated this last scene,
as we, sort of, zero in on her face, and it's really a heroic...
I think, she's really...
There's no doubt about it. She's the hero of the movie.
- Going on to greater adventures. - CLEMENTS: On to new adventures.
Yay, Moana.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
CLEMENTS: Chris Williams, Don Hall, just helped so much on the...
MUSKER: I was gonna talk about the music, but, yeah.
CLEMENTS: Well... MUSKER: So...
Alessia Cara is doing this song.
Actually, Tom MacDougall, our VP of music,
brought forward a number of people
as a possibility of doing this end song,
and Alessia's very young, she's Canadian.
And he played us her voice on her own song,
he played us a video of hers.
And we loved the quality of her voice,
and the kind of vulnerability she had in that.
And so, she did a whole music video connected with this,
and this was produced,
as these end credits songs are often by other producers,
but I really liked this different pop treatment of the song, and...
CLEMENTS: And visually...
MUSKER: Visually, this was designed by Chris Williams,
it was really his idea to go in...
He was like, "We were talking, should we do credits with
"hand-drawn animation?"
And it was considered for a while, though we were very late,
and it would have been almost impossible to do.
But I think Chris felt like,
"There's so much details in what they've created
"that we haven't really totally enjoyed.
"What if we just had giant close ups of these things against the credits?"
So, he helped pick out these images,
and really, this is, sort of, his title sequence here.
And I really like the way it turned out.
Ian Gooding hand-painted all these initial titles
in terms of this typeface, it's a typeface that doesn't quite exist.
Ian invented it with the brush strokes to make it feel handmade.
But we had caustics,
caustics are the reflective lighting that comes back up on objects
that gives you a feeling of, "There's a pool of water off camera."
Ian supervised it, and then the effects people, really...
And lighting really...
Where were they gonna put those caustics?
Where do they play?
And how do they play? How fast do they go?
How much do you see them?
It really is a lyrical way of tying together the movie...
We just saw Robert Neuman's name go by.
I assume you're watching this in mono.
But there's a cool stereo version of this movie
if you get a chance to see it.
I don't know if you'll be seeing it on your TV, or not.
Some of you, eight of you will see that on your TV.
MUSKER: Of course, these movies, they take hundreds of artists, and we...
CLEMENTS: You get to see it here, and we've mentioned some of them,
but I'm sure there...
MUSKER: Tim Nielsen, sound design, he's been amazing.
Bérénice Robinson's post production.
We did our mix-up at Skywalker Ranch.
They happened to be mixing
this other little thing called Rogue One
while we were up there.
We got a sneak peak at the Lucas Archives while we were there.
It was exciting.
- CLEMENTS: Yes, it was. - It was. It was cheesily exciting.
And here we go, hand-drawn animation,
we're finishing off a little bit by the great Eric Goldberg.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, that's probably the last Mini Maui animated.
'Cause these credits were the last thing done...
- We don't actually count this. - MUSKER: And if you'll notice,
he pulls them up at a certain speed,
and then we have to slow them down,
so you can actually read these names,
or you never would have read the names.
Jamie Roberts, fabulous job with the casting on the movie.
She really helped find Rachel.
And we had casting people in the Islands as well.
You know, Rachel Sutton in Hawaii,
who found Auli'i on that last day
and brought her to our attention, which was...
- Thank you, Rachel Sutton. - CLEMENTS: Great story department.
MUSKER: Yeah, we borrowed a lot of people.
CLEMENTS: We mentioned some
of the story people, but there are many people...
MUSKER: Sunmee Joh, fabulous job.
Jeff Ranjo who designed
Maui's song, You're Welcome, storyboarded that.
Really created a lot of those tapa patterns.
And vis-dev, they are the people that really create
the look of so much of the movie, the initial design.
CLEMENTS: We didn't mention Jin Kim,
but certainly a character designer along with Bill Schwab,
both of them instrumental in terms of the designs of the characters.
MUSKER: Right. And "assets" is a term we never got
until we got into CG, which really means
building both the characters and the worlds,
and the characters have to be rigged.
That means they have to put an armature on the characters
so the animators can move them around.
It's actually totally crucial to the whole process,
and they build such great controls.
We got all that expressive acting in part because of what they did.
And this movie really...
So many people comment on the look of the movie,
and the people whose names you're seeing go by,
we owe them a debt of thanks 'cause they had so much to do with
what you see on the screen, really bringing it.
It's really just like with hand-drawn animation,
it starts with a blank piece of paper
and until all of these people get involved,
and the layout people picking camera angles,
helping coordinate the way the camera moves within sets,
how you transition from scene to scene...
Your eye fix, where your eye is looking at any spot.
Nathan Warner and Rob such a big part of all that.
CLEMENTS: We talked about the animators a lot,
but I think that's 'cause we work with the animators,
probably a bit closer than a lot of the other departments.
MUSKER: Right, yeah.
(MUSKER STAMMERS)
This is the most collaborative of all the art forms, I think, really.
It requires many, many people working toward a common goal.
CLEMENTS: And, yay, tech animation.
We didn't really even know what tech animation was
until we did this movie.
And they do the hair, the sails, the ropes, the clothes.
- And they just did an amazing job. - MUSKER: Things that were simulated.
And, effects, these are the special effects.
This is the water. So, all the ocean stuff...
There was a character element,
but there was a humongous effects element.
All these people had a hand in so many of those scenes
where you just are transfixed by the ocean,
that is the work of the people's names you're looking at.
CLEMENTS: This film had more effects than any
recent Disney film in a long, long period of time.
- And they did an incredible job. - MUSKER: Yes.
And the lighters, as we said, they are painters in their own right.
And they make compositions to drive your eye...
CLEMENTS: They really are painters, and you can freeze frames of this movie
and they look like paintings.
They look like beautifully lit paintings.
And so much of the movie is so beautiful.
MUSKER: We never would've gotten this movie to the screen
without people like our associate producer, Nicole Hearon,
and our production manager, Yvett Merino,
and all of the different departmental heads.
- Here's our oceanic story trust. - MUSKER: Right.
CLEMENTS: These are people that we met on our research trips
who stayed involved with the movie.
MUSKER: Papa Mape there, whose quote,
"For years, we've been swallowed by your culture,
"and one time, can you be swallowed by our culture?"
It was our mantra on the movie.
And thank you, all you brilliant musicians,
here and abroad.
It's a world cast of musicians. It's world music. Yeah.
It fulfills that term more so than any movie we've worked on before,
where literally, music came from around the world on this movie
to the ultimate thing that you see in front of you.
And here today... Dave Fluhr's amazing mix.
We mixed it up at Skywalker,
and Dave, we worked with him on Princess and the Frog, amazing sound.
He has to combine all the music, the effects, and the dialogue.
So, what you hear tells the story, and involves you emotionally,
and is clear, and is dramatic, and he did all of that.
And of course, our wonderful Terri Douglas,
and our loopers, and Doc Kane, who did so much of the recording.
CLEMENTS: Along with Gabe Guy and Paul.
MUSKER: Gabe Guy and Paul McGrath. Yeah.
Fabulous.
The tech people who never get credited,
who designed a lot of the software, and kept things going.
When the movie started, we didn't have a lot of the tools
that these people had to develop between hair, water,
and the pipeline itself.
It's just, how can we get a movie this complicated done?
And without them, it never would have been done.
So, thank you one and all.
CLEMENTS: This whole movie was done in a warehouse in Tujunga.
For people just to know...
MUSKER: They don't know where Tujunga is,
it's an island in the South Pacific,
it's right near Tahiti.
CLEMENTS: A regular building has been remodeled,
so both Zootopia and this film
were done in this old warehouse in North Hollywood. It was an experience.
MUSKER: Near the Hollywood airport, so, we would hear jets...
(IMITATES JETS WHOOSHING)
While we were trying
to hear some delicately delivered line of dialogue.
It made for an interesting approval session.
- CLEMENTS: All these people... - John Lasseter and Ed Catmull,
certainly, thank you for letting us make this movie.
And all you department leaders, and, of course...
Elise, did she get up here? She's in there somewhere.
- Or maybe she was earlier. - CLEMENTS: Yeah, but...
MUSKER: Development. They're a department that actually were early on
working this out. Jessica Julius and Maggie Malone
helped devise our research trips back to the South Pacific.
Without those, the whole story would be completely different.
CLEMENTS: And Jessica went on those trips.
MUSKER: And she got a tattoo, and I held her hand while
she got her own tattoo hammered into her in traditional style,
which she can show you.
There'll be a special bonus feature, just on that...
"Jessica's Tattoo," it's called, look for it in the bonus materials.
CLEMENTS: And they put together a book on the making of the movie,
which you can check out.
MUSKER: Yes, I would recommend. If you like the movie, buy the book.
CLEMENTS: Carlos for coffee.
- Very important. - MUSKER: I don't drink coffee, but...
- CLEMENTS: I do. - ...the other 400 people on the movie...
And you, yourself drank several cups a day
to offset all the other medication.
CLEMENTS: I usually drink one cup of coffee, but you're right, as medication...
MUSKER: Boy, it was powerful. It was espresso in the most extreme.
Of course, we wanna give a shout out to Taika Waititi,
New Zealand writer-director
who really wrote the first draft on the script,
and was instrumental in getting this voyage started.
CLEMENTS: The cast of Hamilton, who did demos, they did...
- MUSKER: Actually, we had the demos. - We had the best demos
- that were ever done for any movie. - MUSKER: Right. Yes.
We had Pippa Soo, Chris Jackson sing demos.
CLEMENTS: Production babies. I got to mention Zuzia, my granddaughter,
- was born on the course of this movie. - MUSKER: What row is she in?
Quickly. Tell us.
CLEMENTS: She's in the third row, second name.
MUSKER: Second from the top. Okay.
CLEMENTS: There was also Sebastian, who was Lin's son.
And Jasmine, who's Dwayne's daughter.
MUSKER: Who is about a year old as we're recording this.
- CLEMENTS: Many other babies, but... - Yes.
CLEMENTS: Shoutout to Zuzia.
MUSKER: Thank you all for listening. CLEMENTS: Thank you.
Shiny
CLEMENTS: Oh, yes.
This was our little surprise.
MUSKER: Hyrum Osmond's animation, Jared Bush's writing,
a little tiny bit of improv maybe, but it was mostly written,
but then reconstructed in the editing room.
We had a lot of material, and John Lasseter said,
"Wait a minute. Here, let me add it."
And he stood next to the camera and said,
"Okay, Jeff, what if we cut this here, cut this here..."
I'm like, "Okay, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. That's good."
And then Hyrum animated. The last thing was a secret.
Nobody else on the movie knew about it. And it was funny.
- It was good. - CLEMENTS: Yes. Yes.
- But they know about it now. - MUSKER: We've told them.
CLEMENTS: And I think we're done. I think we're done now. Are we done?
I think we are.