Learning to navigate the waters proves a significant part of Moana’s character arc, and this emphasis pays homage to the cultural significance of traditional Polynesian navigation, methods which are still taught in Taumako. After generations spent on land because the "darkness" has made the seas too treacherous, Moana inspires her people to rediscover the art of wayfinding and to start exploring once again. The enduring mystery of the Long Pause is where Disney finds creative freedom with Moana’s story. Migration scholars have theorized on a number of reasons, from ciguatera fish poisoning from toxic algae bloom to favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño (a warming of average sea temperatures).
No one knows why the Polynesians stopped voyaging for so long, nor why they decided to once again venture east after so many years.
Yet while those islands in the West, including Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, were quickly colonized, it was another 2,000 years before they settled the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia, including Tahiti, Bora Bora, Easter Island and Hawai’i, a mere 500 to 1,500 years ago. These explorers then travelled back and forth to settle their newfound homes. Western Polynesia was colonized three and a half millennia ago by people who travelled thousands of miles across the waters using Stone Age technology and somehow discovered small islands amidst the expanse that is the largest ocean on the planet. This references what scholars call the "Long Pause" in Polynesian history. The audience learns that Moana’s people have long since stopped voyaging and have placed a taboo (itself a word of Tongan origin) on going beyond the island’s reef, which is why Moana’s father reacts with anger when she suggests fishing outside its limits. Moana Learns Wayfinding & References The Long Pause The darkness is what brings blight to Moana’s home and what motivates her to defy her parents’ wishes and embark on her journey across the sea to save her people, a millennium after the heart’s theft. Now in possession of her heart, Maui is attacked by the fire demon Te Ka and loses both his magical fish hook and Te Fiti’s heart to the ocean. As Moana’s opening scenes explain, when the mother island Te Fiti, who yields the power to create life and brings other islands to existence, has her heart - an engraved pounamu (a stone of great cultural significance in Māori culture, and which is considered a taonga, or treasure) - stolen by Maui, her island begins to decline and emits a powerful wave of darkness. Though the initial pitch centered on tales of the demigod Maui, the story was eventually reframed to tell that of Moana, a strong-willed girl kept away from the ocean by her parents until a blight strikes her island, killing fish and vegetation alike.
Related: Moana: Why Pua The Pig Stayed Behind On The Island Anthropologists, historians, cultural practitioners, linguists, tattoo artists, elders, fishermen, and others were assembled to advise on the film’s most minute details. Over the five years it took to develop and produce the movie, Clements and Musker travelled to Fiji, Tahiti and Samoa, and recruited experts from across the South Pacific to the Oceanic Story Trust to consult on the film’s cultural accuracy and representation. When directors Ron Clements and John Musker pitched their idea to then-Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter for a Polynesian mythology-inspired animated film, the latter advised for the men to go on research trips. The film tells the story of Moana ( voiced by Auli’i Cravalho), daughter of Motunui’s chief Tui, who is chosen by the ocean to return the goddess Te Fiti’s heart to her after it was stolen by the shape-shifting demigod Maui (voiced by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson) and lost to the depths of the sea. Disney’s Moanawas inspired by Polynesian myths, history, and culture and has been widely praised for its efforts at cultural authenticity.