TattooTribes in Disney Moana 2

The Disney movie Moana 2 hit the theaters, and since they bought our Handbooks in 2019 we went to see it with some curiosity and maybe expectations.

As with Moana 1, there is some solid background to the story: the first movie related a gap of a thousand years in the exploration of the Pacific Ocean due to Maui stealing a sacred stone.
While this is fictional, it remains true that the exploration of the Pacific came to a halt that lasted almost 1000 years.

This happened when navigators reached the limit of the so-called continental Polynesia, which has more or less close archipelagos, weeks away one from the other.

The technology of the time, and the sailing canoes used till then were not ready to face months-long voyages on an ocean that oftentimes is Pacific only by name.
It took almost one thousand years to develop long, double-hulled canoes that could stand oceanic storms and give shelter to whole families and to the animals and food required for such voyages.

That's a nice way to turn a historic fact into the idea for a new epic, and the movie still remains mostly factually accurate.

While Moana's people wear tattoos that are Samoan (which is fine as the Samoan archipelago was among the last ones being reached before the stop), Maui's tattos and fish hook adornments look mostly Marquesan with Maori and Hawaiian elements (from archipelagos that were all reached after the stop), but being him a demigod who received his tattoos from the divinities themselves, this is not unrealistic and it surely does not compromise the story at all.

In Moana 2 the main idea is to reach an island in the center of the ocean, Motufetū (literally star island), which was the place where all ocean people were once connected.

This clearly seems to be a reference to Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland now identified as Central Polynesia, from which navigators sailed to reach all the yet undiscovered islands, from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand and Rapa Nui in the south (we see references to many of them at the end).

We enjoyed this movie as we did with the first one, with the additional treat that one of our designs from 2008 was partially used to create the design of the manta representing Moana's grandmother Tala on a traditional siapo cloth:

Stay tuned, the Moana saga goes on!