Interview: Disney Animation Supervisor Malcon Pierce Talks MOANA

MOANA is a film of firsts.

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For Auli'i Cravalho, the spunky 14-year-old actress from Oahu, who voices Moana, the spunky 16-year who sails out on a dangerous mission to save her people, MOANA is her first role.

For Malcon Pierce, the Animation Supervisor responsible for crafting the titular character, MOANA meant working with animation giants Ron Clements and John Musker, who share credit for directing and writing the film. "As an animator, I have a bucket list of people I want to work with and Ron and John are definitely at the top of that list," says Pierce. Those unacquainted with Pierce's bucket list may remember Disney's dynamic duo from classics such as ALADDIN or THE LITTLE MERMAID. (Interestingly, MOANA will be Musker and Clement's first fully computer-animated film.)

For Dwayne Johnson, who co-stars as demigod Maui, it's the first time he's appeared on the big screen without his signature "Rock" hard abs.

And for Disney, MOANA features its first Polynesian princess. In this regard, the cast and crew are literally making history. There are so few brown characters in children's movies, anyone who remotely looks like Moana will hold her up as an icon. When I say this to Pierce, he laughs. "I hope [it makes history]," he says, adding that his focus has been to make the title character expressive, spirited, authentic.

"We wanted Moana to be bullet-proof," says Pierce. Which was hard because the girl is always rocking a pandanus skirt and sleeveless tapa top. "There's a lot of skin exposed on the characters so we wanted to make sure [the audience] felt like it was [seeing] musculature and bone underneath when they moved. We wanted the anatomy to be believable. So the rigging team spent hours and hours and hours hand sculpting every articulation of every movement of the arms and the shoulders and the neck," he says. "I feel we've never captured that level of anatomy in our characters before because we've never had the stage before to show it off."

And then there was Moana's hair. "CG hair is difficult to art direct," says Pierce. "It never wants to do what you want it to." But the animator drew from his mentor Glen Keane, the Disney artist behind BEAUTY IN THE BEAST, TANGLED (where he worked with Pierce) , THE LITTLE MERMAID -- to name a few. "[I was] thinking about Ariel's hair and being inspired by how her hair is always sort of mirroring her emotion at the time. It's so expressive. We wanted to try and have Moana's hair be part of her design and her emotion and the scenes. We developed this software called Quicksilver and we were able to pose the hair out and animate the hair in animation and technical animation also, to make the hair feel like it's connected to her performance to make it part of the design of the character and of the acting in the shot," he says. "That was something we've never done before."

Pierce and the four additional animation supervisors credited on MOANA -- Adam Green, Jennifer Hager, Mack Kablan and Daniel James Klug -- collectively wrangle an unwieldy number of crew members. "We have 90 animators, which is a pretty large crew. It's definitely the largest I've ever worked with," says Pierce, who finds correlation and causation between the size of his staff and the diversity of their shots. "We have people that specialize in all kinds of animation. We have people that are really good at comedy and the comedic timing of things. We have people that are really good at action or drama. Subtle acting versus really cartoony [acting]," he says. "We get to deal out these shots to people's strengths ... and usually, when cast correctly, they do something that's completely unexpected."

It's all for a higher purpose says Pierce. He recalls attending a World of Color performance of FROZEN, which he also contributed to: "There were all these kids, but I noticed one little girl on her dad's shoulders. All I could see was the silhouette of her in front of the water." And when a shot he labored over for the "Let it Go" sequence played, the little girl threw her arms out to the side and began to perform in sync with the display. In the moment he made a realization: "We're not doing this for us. This is for these kids and all of these families," he says.

"I remember feeling so incredibly proud of the company and the team of animators, and everybody that worked on the film at that point because she's not thinking, 'Man, I wonder how they did the ice. And I don't think anybody is going to be thinking, especially not the kids, 'I wonder how they did the hair on that.' They'll be engulfed in the magic of these characters."

MOANA starring Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Jemaine Clement, Rachel House, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger, Alan Tudyk, and more, releases nationwide today, November 23. MOANA is rated PG for peril, some scary images and brief thematic elements.

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