Hacker Cinema
Moana
2016 · Film · 107 min
Part of Moana Collection
Directed by John Musker, Ron Clements
AdventureComedyFamilyAnimation
In Ancient Polynesia, when a terrible curse incurred by Maui reaches an impetuous Chieftain's daughter's island, she answers the Ocean's call to seek out the demigod to set things right.
31 positive7 negative1 mixed46 neutralfrom 85 commenters
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96 comments on Hacker News
Hey HN, I built Ellis, an AI notetaker for individuals, not orgs. And since my personal schedule includes meetings outside of Zoom, it was important that it works well for in-person meetings.
In fact to me, in-person conversations have always been a greater source of learning and creative ideas than virtual. On Zoom, the fixed screen and talking points tend to bring out a more transactional nature in me.
Yet building a notetaker for in-person isn't trivial. Online, each speaker has their own audio stream. In a room (or during a walk outside) everyone shares the same mic.
Models like AssemblyAI give you transcriptions with Speaker A and Speaker B, but you still have to mark yourself as the one who said X and not Y.
This is especially true if I want to get coached from my conversations. A useful use case for me as an introvert.
Here's how Ellis does this: 1) You create a voice profile of yourself (Deepgram diarization + pyannote's wespeaker model) 2) It splits the recording into speaker segments using AssemblyAI 3) It surfaces the most distinctive line from each unnamed speaker — "Moana is the best movie ever!" 4) You tap to confirm.
Remember to ask for consent! Ellis prompts you with ways to ask at the start of a recording.
Still not solved: two near-identical voices in the same room (e.g. me and my dad). Curious if anyone found a diarization approach that separates near-identical voices without per-speaker enrollment?
If you have an opinion about the tool, I'm all ears! You can try it for free.
But Moana and the Mandalorian are family/children's films.
Just to be clear, the top grossing movie so far this year: Super Mario Galaxy. And #3: Toy Story 5
In 2025 all the top 10 films were either 3D animation or CGI-heavy action, with one exception: F1 used a lot of practical effects.
Maybe the problem with Moana and Mandalorian is that even lazy uninformed movie-goers recognized an empty cash-grab when they saw the trailer.
In addition to CG fatigue I think users are having remake fatigue. Audiences don't want to see a Moana remake, another Marvel movie or another Superman spin-off. Star Wars and Marvel are getting so overexposed people aren't bothering to show up for them to theaters.
What work of Disney is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identit" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
> Frozen and Moana are 10 years and older now. That doesn't seem new?
That's 10% of the life of the company. And they are just the most striking success of the last decades. Many other movies were made in the meantime. Obviously we cannot expect every attempt to become a generational franchise.
> From what I read about blizzard it seemed like Activision wanted them to treat wow like cod
Activision merged with Blizzard in 2008. At that point the last original game from Blizzard was already 10 years old. Blizzard has been milking its three franchises for the entire 21th century.
By zero screen time do you just mean no phones / tablets / interactive screen use? Or are you including TV / movies etc.
If it's the latter I think you might be over attributing your child's behavioral development to the lack of screen time that it actually is. I have a 3 year old daughter who is much more social and chatty, has a great attention span and self-play / imagination etc. than many of her peers who have zero screen time.
I wouldn't say we give her a lot of screen time, maybe a 2-3 hrs a week (mostly over the weekend) + sickness + the occasional family movie night (Frozen, Moana etc.). But it's enough where she has certain segments of Ms. Rachel episodes memorized.
Anecdotally, the parents who enforce the no screen time rules seem to be the ones who over-parent their kids and have kids who cling to their legs at the park for the first half hour, melt down without snacks, etc.
Also the screen time carries over into other hands free, fun activities like listening to the songs on the speaker and acting out what she had watched or dancing especially during those hectic weeknights when she wants to interact with us but we need to cook dinner and can't sit down to play toys with her.
It feels like children's development is more highly correlated with parents' involvement than with screen time per se. Obviously, a large amount of screen time would cause a lack of involvement, but zero screen time seems more like an act of virtue than one for effect.
Maybe it played a part in Italy:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/11/16/disney-renamed-its-new-film-moana-to-avoid-confusion-with-porn-s/
But it wouldn’t justify other countries. Apparently it’s a trademark thing:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=04d0b34d-efdb-45a5-ac48-19b94c1e445e
I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.
More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.
But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.
Almost every digital movie provider has a rental option. Moana on Prime Video is 3.99 to rent.
> [Moana] only exists in our heads.
Moana and Moana 2 are both animated movies that have already been made. They're not just figures of one's imagination.
> If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright
It might be, or it might not. Copyright protects the creation of derivative works (17 USC 101, 17 USC 103, 17 USC 106), but it's the copyright holder's burden to persuade the court that the allegedly infringing work with the character Moana in it is derivative of their protected work.
Ask yourself the question: what is the value of Moana to you in this hypothetical? What if you used a different name for the character and the character had a different backstory and personality?
> I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books
You might think differently if you had sunk thousands of hours into creating a new novel and creative work was your primary form of income.
> But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone.
It seems unlikely that Disney is would go after you for that. Kids do it all the time.
Disney has a copyright over Moana. I would argue Moana is an idea in the sense that most people think of as ideas. Moana isn't tangle, it's not a physical good. It's not a plate on my table. It only exists in our heads. If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright. Moana is an idea and there are a million ways to express the established character Moana, and Moana itself is an idea built on a million things that Disney doesn't have any rights to - history, culture, tropes, etc.
I understand what you're saying but the way you're framing it isn't what I really have a problem with. I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books, identical word for word. I think people can choose to buy the physical books from the original publisher because they want to support them or like the idea that it's the "true" physical copy. And I'm going to push back on that a million times less than the concept of things like Moana comic books. But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone. And that's ridiculous.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
Also, I wonder if the reference doesn't land because Mikkelson doesn't have the musical skill for it? He sounds to me like he's struggling to hit a few of the notes and some of the more complicated timing marks. Which isn't a slight to Mikkelson so much as I think Miranda has a bad habit of writing songs far too complex for the actors that eventually get asked to sing them and we're in the Disney era where they aren't casting separate singers from voice actors or casting singers first over Name actors. (That was one of the tricks to the "Disney Renaissance" era that Disney seems to have forgotten.)
The most obvious/egregious case being in Moana where in the movie The Rock has fun with but kind of struggles against "You're Welcome" and Miranda himself unfairly sings it over the End Credits just so you know how it sounds like as it was intended to be sung without the compromise of passing it off to a fun Name actor. (Less egregiously/obviously, it is also why "Shiny" is kind of unfair as the villain song in the same movie, because Jemaine Clement as we know from Flight of the Conchords has the raw talent to pull it off and does pull it off, even with Miranda trying to throw him curve balls.)
I haven't seen Mufasa - is Kiros actually a "villain"? Disney has moved away from classic villains in a lot of their animated stories; I seem to remember reading that this was intentional and that they started moving this direction in their storywriting with Frozen, progressed it with Moana (whose "major antagonist" is a mute force of nature and minor antagonist is a silly hurdle to be jumped), and fully realized it with Encanto, which has no singular antagonist at all.
The jerks in these movies end up getting songs that make them out to be silly jerks - minor obstacles on the hero's journey. They don't get villain songs because they're not deserving of them, and the story isn't about defeating a villain, it's about fixing past mistakes/restoring the balance of nature/realizing one's potential/etc.
The thing I dislike most about Tonies is that they don't licence the original recordings for lots of the movie/TV themed characters.
They licence the songs and then record them in-house and goodness me some of them are disappointing if you are familiar with the real soundtracks. The Moana one has the same two singers doing impressions of every character.
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
94 The Good Dinosaur 92 Trolls 98 Wall-E 88 The Lion King 103 Moana 81 Toy Story 91 Trolls World Tour 95 Inside Out 103 Frozen II 95 A Bug's Life > We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
Moana
Frozen
Lego movie
Mulan
101 Dalmatians
Super Mario Bros
——
Having kids does that to you.
This reminds me of a limited time exhibition at the Mirakan museum in Tokyo back in 2017 (I believe it toured). It was focusing on Disney animations and how they wereade, in particular Moana as that was the most recent release at that point. The focus on every single part of the process was so impressive, plus seeing items used in the creation of the films was fantastic. It sticks in my mind to this day.
> They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence.
This is something that everyone wants.
> If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc.
This is true of everything too.
Why would these common factors only lead the MCU to abandon the idea of plotting its movies? How come Moana had a plot?
Not an IP lawyer, but I think the company that produced the movie owns the relevant IP, and Johansson might also own IP around it.
You can have an opinion on it, but they are going to get sued. Just like I can't take Moana and throw her in an ad where it says "I like [insert cereal here]", they can't take a character and use it without expecting Disney/whoever to come sue them.
Well this is just straight up false. Moana was a massive success. Frozen is a monstrous success for them. Star Wars not being a success is objectively false. The Force Awakens is the second best selling Star Wars movie of all time.
Tangled (Repunzel), Moana (uses and remixes actual Polynesian myths), Frozen (based on the snow queen), Peter Pan, Little Mermaid - a stack of recent Disney movies have been based on existing IP. You just don't notice because they culturally steamroll the originals.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
I feel like some of the examples you list are a poor choice to illustrate your point.
Both Harry Potter (books so more than films, but in the films too) and Aang have plenty of flaws, and there's arcs and events that help them grow/develop.
It's been a while, but Katniss does have plenty of flaws and growth (and even some things she never overcomes about her self). Although, it's been a few years since I've read Hunger Games, I feel like she doesn't belong in the same category as Bella (which feels like a placeholder character intentionally). Tris from Divergent might be a good example though, but even there there's some growth.
Regarding some of the super heroes: they're all kinda "super" and very mary-sue-ish, I agree. But they still face challenges and difficulties they need to overcome, or the stories they're part of (rather than the character themselves) are otherwise interesting.
Most of the modern "strong female leads" are just boring (and this comes from a gay boy who LOVES strong women, my favourite characters are women: Sydney Bristol, almost every one from ATLA & Korra, Willow & Buffy, Halliwell sisters, Xena, Lara Croft, Jade from BG&E, women from Harry Potter, Aya from Parasite Eve games, an uncountable plethora of amazing female characters in Anime and manga, and I could go on and on and on, it's not like it can't be done, or hasn't been done, it has been done MANY times). The only challenge these modern Disney SFLs face is not believing in themselves (and as someone who struggles on and off with self esteem issues, I realise how difficult those can be, but also it's not "enough" to base a whole character around just that), usually with a sprinkle of "blame the patriarchy" in there too.
All this misandry and trying to portray any masculinity as toxic is just lame. It's very similar to Disney's queer coding of villains. I remember in my teens, while being a sexually confused and closed queer how sensitive I was to that bullshit and how awful and ashamed it made me feel. It's ludicrous how it's being done again, just the aggressor and targeted demographics are different now. I can't tell if that's just Disney's Modus Operandi, or of this is some type of bitter revenge writing. It sucked then and it sucks now, and it will continue to suck. We need to do better.
People mentioned elsewhere in threads that people complain about too many POCs. I've not seen much of this (maybe a few low quality posts online, but that's just racist drivel of a few small minced idiots, and rarely anyone cares about it). What people dislike is their liked characters' identities getting twisted to fit "modern audiences" (often it's MORE than just race). And the irony is, not even this mythological modern audience likes it because it usually ends up being a shallow self insert, so then down the line the audience gets blamed and called names). There's plenty of original PoC characters that are loved (of Disney: Mulan, Pocahontas, Aladdin/Jasmine, Moana, Lilo, Encanto cast). The whole "well why does it matter" argument is also a bit of a bad faith bait. If it didn't matter, why so bullishly insist on changing it?
You might have the wrong movie. Moana spent 5 years in development, made almost $700m at the box office, and has a 95% RT rating (critics rating) and an A CinemaScore (audience rating). Nobody else seems to have noticed the "fundamental story mistakes."
Alot of executives must believe it's due to piracy.
A lot of people think it's because they're woke. It's not even that - they're just bad movies. I watched Moana a few times and realized they're making fundamental story mistakes. Characters never resolve their conflicts, jokes are prioritized over theme, and important character traits are shown too quickly to the point where you can miss it if you blink.
We really need Disney to slow down and understand that the story comes first with these movies and that good stories take a long time to develop. Frozen took like fifty years to finally make. BatB took four plus numerous failed iterations over decades.
I highly recommend that everyone read the Katzenberg memo[0] from the 90s that was sent out right before Disney went from middling studio to international powerhouse.
[0]https://sriramk.com/memos/katzenberg.pdf
They recently broke YouTube search even more. Go to a channel and do a search within that channel using the search field that is on the far right of the options below the channel information. You may have to click the ">" on the right to make it visible.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
Usually elicits positive responses when I say I contribute to hardware and software that helps you enjoy movies like Cars and Moana with your kids!!!
Made me think. What are non-obviously bad names that were allowed to stay and weren’t?
Off the top of my mind:
- Siri means ass in Japanese. Apple kept the name and except for some initial memes people seems to be used to it.
- Colgate apparently sounds similar to hang yourself in some Spanish dialects (Argentinian according to google). I’m a bit uncertain if it kept its name there
- Kalpis (Japanese soft drink) changed its name overseas as marketing feared it sounded too similar to “cow piss”
- Moana/Vaiana. Disney used different names for this movie between America and Europe, allegedly because of a name clash with an Italian politician/adult movie star. The name change wasn’t an afterthought as the original cast recorded all relevant lines and songs with both names for a simultaneous release across markets.
- the 2002 movie “XXX” was read by many as an word for pornography and top result on google for the name returns porn sites along with IMDb. Unabashedly the studio went on to create 3 movies in the franchise. I think that shows even obviously bad names can work. XXX was advertised on billboards and prime time TV across territories.
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output.
I would take Tangled over Moana any day of the week. Moana looks fantastic and the music is good, but the story of the movie left me pretty cold.
Encanto was unsubtle messaging condemning achievement and distinction, Moana wasn’t bad but also a transparent vehicle for progressive gender norms. They embody the parts that drags modern movies down.
Huh?
Disney Animation Studios (not Pixar) has made three movies in the last ten years that are among the highest grossing movies of all time (Frozen, Zootopia, and Frozen II).
In terms of quality, anecdotally two of my personal favorite Disney movies ever were done by them within that timespan as well (Moana and Encanto).
My impression has been that the gap between Disney Animation Studios and Pixar has drastically narrowed.
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My toddler loves the movie Moana. Turns out part of the movie is based on a real historical time period where Polynesian people stopped sailing long distances to colonize new areas.
https://historydaily.org/disneys-moana-depicts-an-actual-event-in-polynesian-history/5
Our culture is trying to destroy the masculine as fast as it can. Tate and the rise of Islam is a reaction to it.
You can look at all the Disney movies for kids: all men are stupid, liars, stealer, and when you hit them it’s funny. On the opposite the feminine is often perfect, manage it all on the first try.
Currently most men get soft and depressed, a few react in opposition to the current progressive narrative.
Here is one example with Moana https://youtu.be/ZT6Qo146Ncs
I'm a huge fan of the Disney movies that came out when I was growing up (Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are my favorites). My kids like those movies a lot too.
But I think some wonderful movies have been made in the last ten years, most notably Encanto and Turning Red. They're both massive successes, and I think they are in many ways better than those movies I grew up with.
Not to mention Frozen, Moana, Inside Out, etc. These are all wonderful movies.
(Ratatouille is also great, btw, don't get me wrong!)
Yes I will say my daughter absolutely loves Encanto (and also Moana). Also the Good Dinosaur (but we had to cut back on that because she started growling like the feral child in the movie and that seemed like a bad development!). The music in Encanto is good.
I’ve got four kids (ages 2 - 10) so I’m likely prime target demographic for Disney.
Didn’t take my kids to see any of these, haven’t streamed them.
Before 2020 we probably saw every Disney and Pixar animation movie since 2012 with our kids. Some of them multiple times - Inside Out was genius, and I still hum Moana to myself.
We had zero interest in these movies from the trailers, and once we learned they would come with great big ice cream scoops of propaganda and eye-rolling allegory it was easy to say “no thanks” and keep our money.
Going back even further, mine loved Jungle Book more than anything recent. Now that's staying power!
Anymore, we'll just wait for them to hit streaming. As GP mentioned, the latest movies just haven't seemed very good. Not up to par with the likes of Moana and Frozen, at least.
once again, I agree with your sentiment - this culture of simulation and replication is extremely tiresome - but as a case in point, Disney doesn’t fit the bill
to illustrate, the realistic choice would be to choose between Snow White and Frozen and Moana.
to be clear, this isn’t me blindly supporting Disney: I don’t watch their films, I don’t work for them, I don’t own their stock. moreover, I in fact have swathes of scepticism for colossal nation-shaped megacorps; nevertheless it’s a bad example weakening a good hypothesis, and this I have a problem with
FWIW, Encanto (Disney Animation, 2021) and Turning Red (Pixar, 2022) were the most streamed movies on any platform for all of 2022 according to Nielsen. Moana (Disney Animation, 2016) was #4.
It's debatable whether these films feel like "sequel direct to DVD" or not, but I don't think it's debatable that audiences are watching them.
https://www.adweek.com/lostremote/nielsen-top-15-stranger-things-most-streamed-program-2022/71019/
Yup. Even if you only look within a relatively small category of films one per year can miss a bunch. For example, consider the category of animated feature length films released after 2000 in the US, and pick one per year by picking the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
In 2001 you'd miss Monsters, Inc. because of Shrek.
In 2002 you'd miss Lilo & Stitch because of Spirited Away.
In 2004 you'd miss Shrek 2 because of The Incredibles.
In 2005 you'd miss Howl's Moving Castle and Corpse Bride because of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
In 2008, no Kung Fu Panda because of WALL-E.
In 2009, no Coraline or Fantastic Mr. Fox because of Up.
In 2010 you'd miss How to Train Your Dragon because of Toy Story 3.
In 2011 no Kung Fu Panda 2 because of Rango.
In 2012 no Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, or Wreck-it Ralph because of Brave.
In 2014 no How to Train Your Dragon 2 because of Big Hero 6.
2015 no Shaun the Sheep Movie because of Inside Out.
2016 you miss Kubo and the Two Strings and Moana because of Zootopia.
2019 No How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World because of Toy Story 4.
2021 you'd miss Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca because of Encanto.
Most of the winners are good...but if you just put all the above mentioned films in a pool and asked most people to pick their top 14, most would have a lot of films on their list that were not among the winners of the aforementioned years.
I'd say AES Encryption/Decryption (aka: every HTTPS connection out there), and SHA256 Hashing is big. As is CRC32 (the VPMULDQ instruction), and others.
There's.... a ton of applications of AVX512. I know that Linus loves his hot-takes, but he's pretty ignorant on this particular subject.
I'd say that most modern computers are probably reading from TLS1.2 (aka: AES decryption), processing some JSON, and then writing back out to TLS1.2 (aka: AES Encryption), with probably some CRC32 checks in between.
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Aside from that, CPU signal filtering (aka: GIMP image processing, Photoshop, JPEGs, encoding/decoding, audio / musical stuff). There's also raytracing with more than the 8GB to 16GB found in typical GPUs (IE: Modern CPUs support 128GB easily, and 2TB if you go server-class), and Moana back in 2016 was using up 100+ GB per scene. So even if GPUs are faster, they still can't hold modern movie raytraced scenes in memory, so you're kinda forced to use CPUs right now.
Moana is also rebellious however?
Turning Red isn’t about rebelling. It’s about finding out who you are. In the film she only really rebels against her mom about one thing, which is the same number of times Moana defies her dad. The rest of the movie is about her desire to venerate her ancestors while still being true to herself. In many ways it’s similar to Moana.
I’m unsure how any of these are “woke” so much as messages you disagree with. Which is fine, but I would encourage reflecting on it further.
Disney has had tons of rebellious characters over the decades. Ariel is rebellious. Simba is rebellious. Belle is rebellious. Mulan is rebellious. Lilo is rebellious. Aladdin is rebellious. Tony Stark is rebellious. Peter Parker is rebellious.
Interesting characters tend to be rebellious. Luke is literally a rebel who doesn’t listen to his father after all.
I dunno. My wife and I used to insta buy/ take our kids to see Disney movies, but now we double check what sorts messages the movie has in it.
For example, Turning Red. It seems to have a message of… never listen to your parents? Rebel against authority? I’m not sure exactly. It’s a weird movie.
Which is interesting because Moana is, as an adult, possibly one of my favorite movies of all time. The messaging of the heroes journey, venerating your ancestors, but being able to look toward the future and find a new way that sometimes faces resistance is a perfect tale. Then there’s also the subtext of Maui and Tefiti being the archetypal divorced couple, with Maui stealing her heart which causes severe emotional trauma until she is healed by Moana, the archetypal child mending the family.
Frozen is a weird one, I could write a book about it.
Princess and the Frog is great.
It’s so weird! I never know if a mainline Disney movie is going to be good or terrible. I don’t really know what’s going on over at Disney right now.
As a millennial who grew up watching the great Disney movies of the 90s, I just pretend the remakes don't exist.
Disney (classic Disney-Princess-Disney, excluding Pixar, Marvel, and all the "properties" they've acquired over the years) has made a great movie once every 3-8 years for the past few decades. In between, they've always made utter garbage to squeeze every dollar out of the great ones. Almost every Disney sequel has been a turd. Doesn't anyone remember how disappointing it was? This is just more of the same.
They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
There is no stigma for anglophones to be called Kevin. Only french "Kevins" carry the stigma mostly because, as stated in the article, it carries a strong signal of having a lower social-economic background.
Kevin carry that signal very strongly but it happens all the time, each time an "unusual" name gain popularity in a given period due to its appearance in popular culture.
For exemple, let's take the 2016 Disney movie "Moana" which was called Vaiana in France. In the years before the movie, there were about 4 or 5 Vaiana born per year. When the movie came out, it shot up to 60. On the scale of the country, it's not much but it's still an order of magnitude increase in a single year. You can bet that being called Vaiana and be born in 2017 will carry that same signal of having parents that name their children after the popular movie of the moment.
The only difference is that there were 14000 Kevins in 1991 and not 60, so it basically became a meme.
Yes, I have to second this. While there is some edge to technology in the render sphere, no one went to see Moana or Sea Beasts due to the amazing water effects. They went because of word of mouth or advertising and were subsequently awed by said effects.
You can have the most advanced visual effects and still make a terrible movie. And you can make a great movie with slightly outdated effects and still wow people (Mitchels vs The Machines is a great example).
Dreamwork, being in the business of movie-making and not technology as a service, only benefits from an open renderer atmosphere. Pretrained talent, open source collaboration and contributions to improving their software and PR wins.
OR, you could play videogames and have great bonding moments.
The hand-eye coordination my daughter has is incredible too, her creativity is incredible. A lot of in-the-park games are a consequence of what we play: one time she grabbed a short stick (a wand) and a huge stick (I assume a two handed sword) and invited me to go around and defeat monsters and bosses. Never played a game like that in the park with her, she came up with it. We actually had a great time.
Use videogames like any other toy: with a critical eye at all time, with moderation at all time.
EDIT: Sorry I'm very bitter on this. People keep treating videogames like a special case, but it's like any other toy. TV included. Just keep careful eye on your child and constantly re-evaluate how toys are impacting them. It's easy to see how more than 1 hour TV makes your child grumpy and bored, however it's also easy to see how some movies stimulate her will to dance and sing (Moana, Frozen), which in turn promotes playing with her little brother.
i see your point, but hans and runeard were not the primary _antagonist_ in each of those movies, and te ka was actually a good being who acted negatively because of maui's actions.
hand and runeard were essentially "living" props and if anyone one moana was a villain, it was maui. again, i see your point, but i think the point of the article and how i parsed it was that the pure good v evil villain motif has gotten significantly more nuanced recently.
They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.
i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist.
frozen moana frozen 2 encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago
agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-copy-good/
> Moana scene (https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene...) is 131 GBs of RAM for example. It literally wouldn't fit on the M1 Max. And that's a 2016-era movie, more modern movies will use even more space. The amount of RAM modern 3d artists need is ridiculous!!
I doubt there was any laptop available in 2016 that could be loaded with enough RAM to handle those Moana scenes. I doubt such beasts exist in 2021.
It seems the M1s are showing that Apple can just increase the number of cores and memory interfaces to beef up the performance. While there's obviously practical limits to such horizontal scaling, a theoretical M1 Pro Max Plus for a Mac Pro could have another doubling of memory interfaces (over the Mac) or add in an interconnect to do multi-socket configurations.
That's all just horizontal scaling before new cores or a smaller node process becomes available. A 3NM process could get roughly double the current M1 Max circuitry into the same footprint as today's Max.
That's also a good point. EPYC has 2TB or 4TB of DDR4 RAM support.
That being said: its amusing to me to see the x86 market move into the "server-like" arguments of the 90s. x86 back then was the "little guy" and all the big server folks talked about how much bigger the DEC Alpha was and how that changes assumptions.
It seems like "standard" servers / systems have grown to outstanding sizes. The big question in my mind is if 64GB RAM is large enough?
Moana scene (https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene/) is 131 GBs of RAM for example. It literally wouldn't fit on the M1 Max. And that's a 2016-era movie, more modern movies will use even more space. The amount of RAM modern 3d artists need is ridiculous!!
Instinctively, I feel like 64GB is enough for power-users, but not in fact, the digital artists who have primarily been the "Pro" level customers of Apple.
I've heard criticism of Maui (e.g. being fat, which apparently is a stereotype), but as Disney goes, I think Moana the film was pretty respectful.
But Disney seems to think “we made a film of this” entitles them to Intellectual Property ownership of all the concepts the film covers.
I do have a problem with movie merchandise in general for being cheaply made plastic garbage, I just don't think there's anything more egregious about the Maui costume than anything else. And Christians already have the market cornered with tacky Body-of-Crist merch in the form of Mass play sets. If you ask me the Orthodox have the right idea, just give the kids the real Holy Communion from the moment they're baptised, bypassing the whole need for that garbage, but that's besides the point.
I think Moana was actually very good, and I was greatly and pleasantly surprised to see something of that quality come out of Disney. It's a captivating story that stands on its own legs without any pandering or preaching, and I see nothing wrong with how it represents Polynesian culture.
I'll post the link again: https://www.render-blog.com/2020/10/03/gpu-motunui/
This person rendered the Moana scene on just 8GBs of GPU VRAM. It does this by rendering 6.7GB chunks at a time on the GPU, with the CPU keeping the RAM-heavy "big picture" in mind. (EDITED paragraph. First wording of this paragraph was poor).
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Its not that these problems "cannot be solved", its that these problems "become grossly more complicated" when under RAM / VRAM constraints. They're still solvable, but now you have to do strange techniques.
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With regards to a Ray-tracer, tracing the ray-of-light that's bouncing around could theoretically touch ANY of the 93GBs of static object data (which could have been shifted by any of the 131 GBs of animation data). That is to say: a ray that bounces off of a any leaf on any tree could bounce in any direction, hitting potentially any other geometry in the scene.
That pretty much forces you to keep the geometry in high-speed RAM, and not do an I/O cycle between each ray-bounce.
As a rough reminder of the target performance: Raytracers aim at ~30 million to 30-billion ray-bounces per second, depending on movie-grade vs video-game optimized. Either way, that level of performance is really only ever going to be solved by keeping all of the geometry data in RAM.
> A100 with 80GB and 16x per rack give you 1.3 TB of VRAM addressable from any GPU in the rack.
That doesn't mean it makes sense to traverse a BVH-tree across a relatively high-latency NVLink connection off-chip. I know GPUs have decent latency hiding but... that's a lot of latency to hide.
Again: your CPU-renderers can hit 10s of millions of rays per second. I'm not sure if you're gonna get something pragmatic by just dropping the entire geometry into distributed NVSwitch'd memory and hoping for the best.
Honestly, that's where the 8GB CPU+GPU team becomes interesting to me. A methodology for clearly separating the geometry and splitting up which local compute-devices are responsible for handling which rays is going to scale better than a naive dump reliant on remote-connections pretending to be RAM.
Video games hit Billions of rays/second. The promise of GPU-compute is on that order, and I just doubt that remote RAM accesses over NVLink will get you there.
> If you are willing to bet cash on Moana never fitting on a single GPU, I'd take you on that bet. Sounds like free money to me.
The issue is not Moana (or other movies from 2016), the issue are the movies that will be made in 2022 and into the future. Especially if they're near photorealistic like Marvel-movies or Star Wars.
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The other problem is: what's cheaper? A DGX-system could very well be faster than one CPU system. But would it be faster than a cluster of Ice-Lake Xeons with AVX512 each with the precise amount of RAM needed for the problem? (Ex: 512GBs in some hypothetical future movie?)
A team probably would be better: CPUs have expandable RAM, that's their biggest advantage. GPUs have fixed RAM. Slicing the problem up so that pieces of Raytracing fits on GPUs, while the other, "bulkier" bits fit on CPU DDR4 (or DDR5), would probably be the most cost-efficient way at solving the raytracing problem.
The GPU-Moana experiment showed that "collecting rays that bounce outside of RAM" is an efficient methodology. Slice the scene into 8GB chunks, process the rays that are within that chunk, and the collate the rays together to find where the rays go.
So we know that GPUs are really good at raytracing and matrix multiplication, two things that are needed for graphics programming.
However, the famous "Moana" scene for Disney-level productions is a 93GB (!!!!) scene statically, with another 131GBs (!!!) of animation data (trees blowing in the winds, waves moving on the shore, etc. etc.).
That's simply never going to fit on a 8GB, 40GB, or even 80GB high-end GPU. The only way to work with that kind of data is to think about how to split it up, and have the CPU store lots of the data, while the GPU processes pieces of the data in parallel.
https://www.render-blog.com/2020/10/03/gpu-motunui/
Which has been done before, mind you. But it should be noted that the discussion point for GPU-scale compute runs into practical RAM-capacity constraints today, even on movie-scale problems from 5 years ago (Moana was released in 2016, and had to be rendered on hardware years older than 2016).
Moana scene is here if you're curious: https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene/
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But yes, if your data fits within the 8GBs GPU (or you can afford a 40GB or 80GB VRAM GPU and your data fits in that), doing everything on the GPU is absolutely an option.
And yet the end up giving in to it in the end, with Anna marrying Kristoff. That plot line follows a pretty standard trope. It felt a little pasted on.
I think the movie would have been slightly more successful (to me) by eliminating Kristoff, so as to not lose its core focus on Anna and Elsa. Elsa's decision to be a hero or a villain, to face or run away from her fear, is the real core of the film.
You'd still need to find a way to keep Sven. The prince for the princess should be optional (as it was in Moana); the animal companion is not.
This isn't criticism, just a thought experiment. I have genuine criticism of the sequel, which I felt undercut the themes much more strongly.
10 years is a lot of time, and "worth saving" is a very low barrier.
I'd classify Kubo And The Two Strings, and Inside Out as must-watch films. Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse set new boundaries for what's possible with animation.
Moana, Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Wreck-it Ralph, The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory are all pretty good films, and definitely tick all the boxes you listed.
I'm not even looking at Anomalisa, Isle of Dogs, and other such more adult-oriented animated films.
Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself.
"Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American.
Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.
Sorry to hear you're suffering through this experience. I can emperically recommend Moana (the pixar movie) for perfect familiar background noise - it was my go-to on red-eye flights for a long time.
Aka Vaiana in many European countries to, ostensibly avoid “trademark” issues, but realistically to avoid unexpected Google confusion with Moana the adult film star.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-changes-moana-title-italy-avoid-porn-star-confusion-948679
To answer the implied question at a different level: The scene being rendered is the fictitious island Motunui from the 2016 Disney film Moana.
I just have to say that this is really excellent work.
Especially impressed as I've watched this movie at least 100 times over the last year. My 20 month old daughter is infatuated with it (not to worry, we usually limit viewing to a song-scene or two per sit down). The songs are involuntarily memorized and cries of "mana song" (sic) can be heard each time the toddler gets into the car. To the point that my wife, 3 month old daughter, the oldest, and myself are dressing up for Halloween as TeFiti, kakamora, Moana, and Maui, respectively.
If the OP should see this - what prompted you to want to attempt it, was it just the availability of the dataset or were you drawn into the story by screaming children as well?
Based on the documentary Moana, maybe there came a time where things were not going well at their current place so they set out looking for a new place.
Or maybe warring peoples invaded from the west, so they picked up and headed east looking for a new home.
Or maybe there was overpopulation on their island so they looked for a new place to spread out.
Or maybe they were just like us and some young guys were thrill seekers/adrenaline junkies/adventurers/etc. and they just wanted to head out to see what they could find.
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
I'll give a shot at explaining isosurfaces in a little more detail.
The prefix iso- means "the same." An isosurface is a surface for which some value is the same at every point. Marching Cubes is used for creating a polygon mesh of a 3D isosurface, but it's easier to understand by first imagining the 2D case.
In two dimensions, you don't really have isosurfaces. As you lack the third dimension, you have isolines. You're probably familiar with those already when viewing terrain maps. The contour lines on terrain maps are isolines. They are drawn for some chosen height value(s) and as you trace along a line, every point on that line has the same height value. You can generate those lines using "marching squares", a 2D version of marching cubes.
I'm not terribly familiar with the details of the marching cubes algorithm, because I took one look at the tables I'd need to transcribe and decided not to implement it myself, but basically you split the world into a big grid. You query the values at the grid cell corners, and based on which corners are above or below the isovalue, you know what edges the isosurface passes through.
There's a table of shapes to that correspond to a given combination of corners in or out. For edges that have an intersection point with the isosurface, you then estimate its position on the edge by interpolating the two corners and finding the where it equals the isovalue.
The results of most VFX fluid simulations today are particles, and the distance to the nearest particle creates a distance field defined through all space. If you pick some distance value, you can then polygonize the isosurface with marching cubes. You'll probably also need a bit of smoothing, since otherwise the isosurface will be bumpy.
I'm not sure if films like Moana [1] actually polygonized their fluid isosurface before rendering it or if they directly solved the equation for the implicit surface during ray tracing, but the fact that I can't tell should give you some indication of the potential quality of the result.
[1]: https://www.sidefx.com/community/walt-disney-animation-studios-moana/
In the cases of Brave and Moana at Pixar and Disney Animation respectively, the story definitely came before the tech was developed. I was an intern at Pixar during the production of Brave, and I worked on Moana, and I can say that in both cases, there was a mad scramble to develop the tech to catch up with the story. We didn't really have the water on Moana working completely correctly until like 6 months before the movie came out.
One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana.
The service is terrible, often breaks, and has an undocumented but necessary auth code step, with the added gotcha that the ui covers over the code sometimes. The ui is also terrible, who would make it so the next episode of a series doesn't come on by itself? Children are the target audience.
Anyway why wouldn't they either fix up what they've got, or use the lessons so that they don't get a meltdown on the first day?
Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really feels like it.
Most of us outside of entertainment business don't know this but Disney had been taking huge dissing from media as well as academics for princess movies. They have started change their ways and recent slew of movies like Moana focuses far less on being pretty and waiting for price to arrive putting female character as a confident leader. But you have to be very careful in chosing Disney content. As I said, ultimately entertainment company's goal is to hook you up with crack cocain, not your long term well being.
I don't think it's the same thing for Disney to create fantastic to CG animation, and Disney to buy Pixar.
They are doing both (creating and buying). They bought Pixar, but are also making movies internally that are comparable in quality like Frozen, Big Hero 6, Moana, and Wreck it Ralph.
SF had lots of great progressive ideas, but SF didn't always disrupt contemporary gender roles when it could've. I'm imagining girls who were interested in the stories, ideas, science, etc., and picking up on the discouraging gender role reinforcement.
> "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?"
One cultural improvement we hopefully have to look forward to: The more recent "Moana" (one of my favorite films) finally fixes the gender roles programming of the Disney princess stories, as far as I could tell, but it implicitly accepts classism. The child is wandering through her community, noting the people doing their various working class labor, accepting that's their predetermined roles in life, and agonizing that her birthright role of chief will prevent her from exploring.[1] Maybe someday we'll all tell her to go do her share of the coconut harvesting, and that she should demand to replace the monarchy with elected representatives. Then everyone will have some time to explore, if they want.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo&t=1m
This is completely nonsensical.
Toy Story? Cars? Inside Out? Up? Coco?
None of these follow that template. Sure, some like a Bugs Life and Rattatouille follow this, but in quirky ways. All conventional narrative structure involves an external incident. That sets up the central conflict of the narrative.
Disney movies like Big Hero 6, Moana or Frozen are more likely to follow it, though again, there’s a lot more craft in the story and surrounding context than the base structure suggests.
let input = { relative = "daughter" , movies = [ "Boss Baby", "Frozen", "Moana" ] }
We don't frequent the same kind of "non-technical users" I guess.
Where do Disney's TV channels fit into this? Besides the obvious Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior, they also own the FX channels and Freeform.
Their movies currently eventually make it to those, and that is mostly where I've watched them. Sure, they take some time to get there. They are currently just up to 2016, with Moana, Finding Dory, Rogue One, and Doctor Strange being where they are up to in Disney animation, Pixar animation, Star Wars, and Marvel, respectively. But none of their franchises are ones that I need to keep current with anymore [1], so I don't mind.
[1] I did subscribe to Netflix for a month a few months ago specifically to get up to date on Marvel, so I could see Endgame in theaters. That was a special case because I decided it would be too hard to avoid major spoilers in the two or three years it would take to show up on cable.
"Soundtracks."
That isn't a genre, but each soundtrack offers has its own themes and style. Depending on mood you can have techno (Hackers/Matrix), fantasy (LOTRs/Interstellar), Pop (Greatest Showman/Guardians of the Galaxy), Regional Styles (Last Samurai/Moana), or even just calming/relaxing (Sims 3: Pets).
PS - Try not to dismiss soundtracks just because you never liked the movie/game. I never played the Sims 3, let alone the "Pets" expansion, but the soundtrack remains me of SimCity's sound.
The examples the author uses and states that they are “almost real” are in no way almost real. To compare his short film to Disney price and art is a joke. They’re nothing a like. One of Disney’s Moana stills was something like 15GB+. Try do that in real time.
How big is the films asset library in total? AKA How big is Moana's total dataset before render?
How close are the renders to movie-accurate (that is, what's missing?)? Looking at e.g. [0], it seems to be missing a lot vs what is seen in the film. Are features missing compared to the original, were things missing from the scene description, or something else? The shorelines from screen stills in particular seem much more sophisticated [1].
[0] http://pharr.org/matt/blog/images/pbrt-moana-beach.jpg [1] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/moana/images/e/e3/How_Far_I%27ll_Go.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161128042412
you _should_ watch Moana, its a great movie with fun music.
then watch it a second time for the animation and rendering....
I think we get plenty local culture as I don't believe that media is a critical component of culture, though I do recognize the benefits and in that regard I think that in the near future my child will likely ask to watch things in English. So far they don't feel left out from mainstream kids movies, because we still watch them (just dubbed but e.g. we watched Moana in English). Additionally the cultural aspect is a big component that they're missing from only consuming media and not interacting with the people directly, so we'll do some traveling to incorporate that into the curriculum.
Be careful, The Last Jedi is definitely part of the "culture wars" effect somebody mentioned elsewhere.
I don't buy it. The Force Awakens is at 88% and culture warriors fought over that one, too. Both films have severe problems from a storytelling perspective, but the problems with The Last Jedi are much deeper, are of the sort more likely to turn off fans of the franchise as well as fans of The Force Awakens. There are plenty of culture-war-neutral analyses of The Last Jedi that absolutely eviscerate the film. For just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7pcCj0ORk
While I can't speak to the 49% rating, where I'm seeing the major divide is between Star Wars fans who care about world building, character development, and a coherent story (historically important aspects of Star Wars); and fans who are content just to enjoy the emotional ride from one scene to the next while enjoying the nostalgia.
As from the culture wars perspective, it seems hard to deny that The Last Jedi takes an unnecessarily overt stance on the culture war, daring that sort of criticism. TLJ includes: a postmodern deconstruction of Luke Skywalker and the Jedi mythos, a purple-haired female admiral dominating the only talented white male on their side for displays of what they probably imagine to be toxic masculinity, and all the bad guys are white males with overt Nazi references. I mean, seriously, why can't they just make it Star Wars?
Take another Disney movie as a contrast: Moana. Moana is a hero's journey, just like the original Star Wars. Moana is about a girl character, her mentor is her grandmother, the story is set in the South Pacific and features non-European cultures and sources their mythology for the story. The twist at the end might be considered feminist. But nobody but serious cranks are complaining about it, because none of it gets in the way of the story and for the most part actually enhances it. Moana isn't made some kind of wunderkind. There's no artificially forced interaction between an SJW stand-in and a white male stand-in. There's no postmodern deconstruction of the myths or themes. Disney is just doing their usual thing of mining ancient myths and fairy tales and adapting them for entertaining mass consumption by modern audiences.
"I'm from The Netherlands, and I can't say for certain, but I can't remember a product being sold at a grocery store that had characters from a children's TV show/movie on the label to try and sell it"
What? You mustn't have any children. There is cereal of Frozen and Moana here, Paw Patrol sprinkles, k3 stuff (forgot which), there's various franchise stuff in the dairy section, ... That's not even counting the non-food section in supermarkets. Next time you're at albert heijn, take a good look around.
You make some good points, but I don't think you have had a 2 year old.
It's not about enriching their lives, or encouraging their development by moving them away from material things...yet. Those goals come a little later.
My kid is actually 1.8, I was rounding up. He likes Moana and watches it every day. He can say ~15 words. The movie's chicken and recognizing songs he has heard before result in pure joy.
He likes to watches the Mickey Mouse club and also likes to point out the characters he recognizes. This is intellectually rewarding to him, because it is at the absolute edge of his abilities.
But I think like you. Disney is evil. When he turns 5, I will throw a brick through the TV and hand him a copy of WALDEN. For now, I'm fucked, at the mercy of a vicious corporate Mouse.
People forget that Disney owns a lot of must-see content:
For example, here is the list of top grossing movies of 2016 http://www.imdb.com/list/ls074920894/
Disney had the following films
1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Rogue One
3. Finding Dory
4. Zootopia
5. The Jungle Book
11. Doctor Strange
12. Moana
19. Alice Through the Looking Glass
For 2017 so far (http://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2017)
Disney has
1. Beauty and the Beast
3. Guardians of the Galaxy V2
11. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Cars 3
They own the Marvel franchise, the Star Wars, as well as some of the most loved children's movies in history. They also have a ton of children's TV programs.
If Disney really had a subscription service with all their movies and TV shows, I would choose them over Netflix.
I miss the old Pixar. Yes, now Disney is making better animated films, but I'm not sure it's worth the loss of truly great Pixar films. Plus, it seems that Disney is slipping too. Though they released some good films after the acquisition of Pixar (Tangled was excellent), their recent releases have been... mediocre. I never liked Cars, Finding Dory could've been better... I suppose Moana was pretty good, but the exception to the new rule. Now to see good, emotionally resonant films, we look to other studios. Kubo was astounding good, for example. Props to Lassiter for his success, but it comes at the cost of great films for the whole family.
> It's ridiculous movies don't tell women stories, nor show women characters; just "love interest", "plot device", etc. Even in fantasy a female lead is surrounded by a male ensemble or is a proto-male.
Looking at the Disney films made in the past decade, it appears female protagonist leads are more prevalent (e.g. Moana, Brave, Frozen, Spirited Away, etc.)
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Also coming into play during Moana is the hyperion rendering engine, which was first showcased in Big Hero 6:
https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperion
Also, here's an article containing some stills from the movie:
http://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2016/11/moana.html
We watched Monana a couple of weeks ago and afterwards my wife said that she was amazed with how good the water looked. I said, I bet there were a bunch of mathematicians working on that :-)
In another life I'd be doing maths for 3D movies. I went to university in Wellington where Weta are based (Peter Jackson's film companies) and at one point had a look around the digital arm. I seem to recall that they had the SGI machines as desktops and a big unix rendering farm. I just love the way you can use maths to create such magic.
Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, Moana is fantastic. Incredible animation, catchy pop hooks in the music and a brilliant storyline. It's wonderful to see a Disney film with a strong female lead that needs neither male support nor a love interest.
Wikipedia is currently -- for the second time -- trying to delete its article about the actress who voices/sings the title character of "Moana", on grounds that she's only notable for that one film and thus doesn't "deserve" to be written about separately from it.
Maybe Assistant could somehow monitor what kind of things users are asking a particular app to do and use that to determine defaults for specific actions in future interactions. Imagine:
"Okay Google, get me movie tickets for Rogue One on Tuesday"
"I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that yet. Try telling me to ask another service like Fandango or MovieTickets.com."
"Ask Fandango"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Rogue One at?"
---
Later when I ask for movie tickets again...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Moana."
"I'm not sure how to do that. Would you like me to ask Fandango?"
"Sure"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Moana at?"
---
Later still...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them."
"Sure, let me ask Fandango... [Switches to Fandango.]"
---
You get the idea. And if a user ever wants to use a different service, they can always ask for it explicitly.
Disney Animation | Interns | Burbank, CA | INTERNS
The Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology Department develops software for our animated films like Moana, Zootopia, and Frozen. Software Engineers work closely with production users to create tools for modeling, rigging, animation, dynamics, shading, effects, look, and/or rendering while leveraging experience in graphics technology, mathematics, and research.
We're looking for interns for a bunch of interesting Summer 2017 projects. Overview of the program is here: https://www.disneyanimation.com/careers/interns-apprentices
If you're interested, you can search open positions and apply here: https://www.disneyanimation.com/careers/open-positions