The original Moana: did a 1926 documentary give birth to a 21st century Disney blockbuster?

Next week sees the release of Moana, the live-action remake of the 2016 Disney animation smash – again starring Dwayne Johnson. But that was not the original Moana. That honour goes to a Moana released a full century ago: a glimpse of Polynesian life now largely forgotten but none the less offering some inspiration to the makers of today’s iteration. “Someone at Disney picked the bones of the 1926 Moana to make their movie,” believes film historian Bruce Posner. The 1926 Moana was a silent documentary by American film-maker Robert Flaherty, who had cemented his reputation a few years before with Nanook of the North, a pioneering portrait of Inuit civilisation. Its epic sequences of walrus hunting and kayaking in icy waters had lit up the box office. So, for his next feature, Flaherty had carte blanche to go anywhere. He chose Samoa. “He had a vision of this great sea monster story,” says Posner, who oversaw a digital restoration of Flaherty’s Moana in 2014. “But when he arrived, there was no sea monster. There was this island life where everybody was happy.” With no peril to capture, Flaherty instead crafted a pastoral picture of Samoan life, centred on a young man named Moana and his family. He spent over a year filming, in a groundbreaking example of on-location moviemaking. “It remains a major milestone,” Posner says, noting the challenges Flaherty faced with his primitive equipment in Samoa’s equatorial climate. To process his film, Flaherty had to set up a lab in a freshwater cave. When he drank the water, he accidentally poisoned himself. “He spent several months near death,” Posner says. When Flaherty finally brought his film home, it was not what the studio had been expecting. Instead of terrifying sea monsters, there were harmless sea turtles. There was no plot either – only gentle scenes of Moana and his family gathering taro roots and coconuts. Despite this, Moana broke box office records during trial screenings in New York. But when the film went …