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In 'Moana,' New Voices Both Uphold And Challenge The Disney Tradition

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"Moana," Disney's newest animated film is named after an imaginary island in the Pacific. Like so many other Disney films, the soundtrack is a big part of the story. But it's tricky. Especially when the movie is about a different culture, the music can end up being cliche or even insulting to some. Tim Greiving has more on how the team behind "Moana" tried to get it right.

TIM GREIVING, BYLINE: Think about the classic Disney animated movies, and you may just start humming songs like this one.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR")

CLIFF EDWARDS: (Singing) When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are...

GREIVING: Or this one.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BARE NECESSITIES")

PHIL HARRIS: (Singing) Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities. Forget about your worries and strife.

RON CLEMENTS: It goes all the way back even to "Steamboat Willie" and the "Silly Symphonies." Music and the animation were just like peanut butter and jelly or something. It seemed like they go hand in hand.

GREIVING: Ron Clements directed "Moana" alongside John Musker. Both men started working at Disney as animators in the mid-'70s. By then, songs had taken a backseat and the division was struggling. But in the late '80s, Disney turned to Broadway and the result was a pretty big splash.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PART OF YOUR WORLD")

JODI BENSON: (Singing) Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun - wandering free, wish I could be, part of that world.

GREIVING: The 1989 hit "The Little Mermaid" helped to revive Disney animation and created a template that continued through "Beauty And The Beast" and "Aladdin" to the company's last release, "Frozen." Three of those four hits, beginning with "Little Mermaid," were the work of lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken.

ALAN MENKEN: We were coming off a big hit, "Little Shop Of Horrors." People clearly wanted us to be doing what we do but aiming it towards a totally different form.

GREIVING: Menken says there's a reason why Broadway and Disney Animation were such a good marriage.

MENKEN: Howard was that rare breed who basically was a dramatist and a writer who understood how to integrate songs into works, the perfect person to come over and to help reinvent the form.

GREIVING: The creators of "Moana" wanted to build on that formula, so they went looking for the brightest star on Broadway today. And the choice was obvious, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created the smash hit "Hamilton." Turns out, he was bitten by the Broadway bug on a trip under the sea.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: When I was 9 years old, I saw "A Little Mermaid" (ph). And when Sebastian the crab began singing a Caribbean calypso number in the middle of a Disney movie - my life has sort of never been the same since.

GREIVING: Miranda, whose family hails from the Caribbean, made sure the songs in "Moana" advanced the story in the musical theater tradition. But he also had to address another Disney legacy. The studio has taken flak in the past for appropriating other cultures in misguided - and sometimes insulting - ways.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ARABIAN NIGHTS")

BRUCE ADLER: (Singing) Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roams, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. It's barbaric. But, hey, it's home.

GREIVING: Disney had that song rewritten following an outcry after the film's initial release. But Miranda says he didn't take this challenge lightly.

MIRANDA: If you're making a movie about a part of the world, like - for many people, that will be their only exposure to that culture. So you should know something about that culture when you write it. I think anyone should be able to write about anything, but your biggest tools are empathy and research, emphasis on the research.

GREIVING: The filmmakers did as much of that as they could, says director Ron Clements.

CLEMENTS: We met so many great people, and not just anthropologists and linguists and archaeologists but villagers and chiefs and sailors and navigators. And one of the elders in Tahiti said for years, we've been swallowed by your culture. One time, can you be swallowed by our culture?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TULOU TAGALOA")

OLIVIA FOA'I: (Singing in foreign language).

GREIVING: The score for "Moana" was composed by Mark Mancina who also arranged the songs for "The Lion King." He says he tried to be careful there, too, turning Elton John's pop songs into showtunes with the help of South African musician Lebo M.

MARK MANCINA: I couldn't have made "Lion King" sound African without working with Lebo. You know, we brought him in, and we did the same thing with this movie. I worked with Opetaia. He came and stayed with me several times.

GREIVING: Opetaia is Opetaia Foa'i, a Samoan musician who helped Mancina and Lin-Manuel Miranda make sure the "Moana" songs were steeped in the culture of Oceania.

OPETAIA FOA'I: You can't fool people, you know. If something's real, something's true, we all sense it. If something's fabricated, we know it, too. Put it this way, my ancestors would be happy with this movie. And that's saying a lot.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE KNOW THE WAY")

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA AND OPETAIA FOA'I: (Singing in foreign language).

GREIVING: Foa'i wrote the song "We Know The Way" and contributed rhythmic chants and input throughout the process. The songs in "Moana" feature Foa'i's vocal group, Te Vaka, as well as a larger choir from Fiji. If these songs go on to become part of the great Disney songbook, Lin-Manuel Miranda says the effect is enormous.

MIRANDA: They stick to your life at the moment you most need them. And when you're a little kid, it may be the first time you've been transported in quite that way. You know, tickets to theater are expensive, but anyone can go see a Disney movie and have that same rush of all the elements coming together to make a really musically transporting moment.

GREIVING: And just as he heard something of himself as a kid in "The Little Mermaid," he hopes today's young audiences will hear sounds that evoke another culture, or their own, in "Moana."

For NPR News, I'm Tim Greiving in Los Angeles.