Moana 2 | Q&A with Jared Bush
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2024’s holiday offering from Disney Animation Studios sees them dig into their beloved bag of modern fairytales, pulling out a sequel to 2016’s Moana. Moana 2 had an unconventional route to the screen in more ways than one. Firstly, the project was initially announced as a Disney+ TV series before being reworked into a feature. Secondly, a large chunk of the production took place at Disney’s Vancouver location, making it a landmark title for Disney – the first theatrical film to bear their name and not be a purely Burbank-ian endeavor.
Change is afoot on the executive level at DAS too, with Jared Bush taking the role of Chief Creative Officer from Jennifer Lee, who is now hard at work on Frozen’s upcoming sequels. Bush has been at Disney for over a decade now, working as a screenwriter on almost all of the company’s modern hits including titles like Zootopia, Encanto and the first Moana.
We chatted to Bush on the week of Moana 2’s release to dig into the new challenges facing the studio, Moana’s new journey and Disney’s dedication to on and off screen diversity.
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What’s it like to have the first film released under your tenure as CCO?
I’m immensely proud. It took hundreds and hundreds of people to make this film, it is breathtakingly gorgeous, I think it’s the most beautiful movie I’ve ever worked on. I’ve been at Disney animation for 13 years, and I’m just blown away by every single frame of this. But on top of that, this is a story of connecting with others and that together we’re stronger, and our crew had to show that for this movie to be in theaters. So more than anything, I’m immensely proud and very grateful to all of the hard work and the heart and the care that the crew put into this.
Animation fans have a tendency to assign a certain style to each studio. As a writer, what would you say is the Disney style?
I think the biggest adjustment that I typically make is, “Is this a musical, or is this not a musical?” Because if you take a movie like Zootopia, it’s heavily comedy-forward versus a musical where music is in charge, and you’re always writing in service of making sure that the music is really going to pop. It’s really fun to bounce back and forth between them because it is a different muscle. Beyond that, our stories are stories that people want to go back and see again. So from a writing standpoint, you’re trying to write in a way that is universal, that hopefully will resonate with people around the world of all ages. I also find that heavily character-forward stories do the best, people will want to go back to spend time with those characters.
Moana is a very competent character who is beloved by her community and has her head screwed on tight. How do you give her something to learn?
In this story, she’s going up against things that she’s never experienced before by design. In the first film, she was 16, she thought she understood what her identity was, like many of us do at that age, you go “I know who I am forever,” and then life changes and you have to reassess. So it was very important to us in this story to constantly throw obstacles in her way that she had never faced before, on a scale that she had never come up against. Specifically, she comes across the Kakamora from the first movie. We wanted her to see something she knows, and if you watch the film, we flip what happens there. I’d say that the only way for a character who is so competent and brave and will always go up against the hard thing is just to throw obstacles at her that are more difficult, and to let her acknowledge that they are difficult. It’s important that she doesn’t go up against these things and says, “I got it. No problem,” but instead “This is really scary, I don’t know how I’m gonna defeat this thing.” It’s critical to make sure that she’s always human, even while she’s brave.
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Maui has the biggest arc from the first film, how do you push that further in a sequel?
In the first film, he was a guy that got wound up thinking about himself and his own glory and needing to find his self worth through the adulation he’s received, specifically from humans. At his very lowest moment in the first film, Moana is the one that buoyed him and allowed him to see that he could derive that self worth elsewhere, that he had intrinsic value. Coming into this story, we wanted to show that what Moana gave him mattered. As he begins his journey he is again trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And then as Moana gets into trouble and she hits a low, he’s the one that’s there to buoy her spirits. We wanted to shift Maui into slightly more of a mentor relationship with Moana in this story. He’s still a goofball, he still doesn’t always give the best advice, he’d still really like to eat Hei Hei, so he’s got some things to work on.
How did you go about adapting the script from the TV show format to a feature film?
I think it’s a lot like Moana’s journey in this story. It was an exciting but daunting task, and something that I’d never attempted to do before. Moana’s arc didn’t change between the series and the feature, the culmination of that story is the same. I think the biggest difficulty was her crew. In the series version, each episode was focused on a specific crew member and they would have an individual arc. But in a feature, you want everyone to arc at the same time, which is at the end of the movie. [Co-director] Dana Ledoux Miller, who is my writing partner in this, and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get everyone to line up at the end of the story. Ultimately, that turned out to be a wonderful thing, because I think we never would have been able to deliver this epic scale and scope that we have in our third act and have all the characters culminate at the same time.
How did the pipeline differ due to working with the Vancouver studio?
There’s a lot more crossover [between Burbank and Vancouver], than people may understand. Our process for any film is one of constantly trying things. We are building characters and assets and locations and pressure testing that and putting up screenings constantly and so yes, while originally full production was slated for our location in Vancouver, there was always going to be a ton of crossover.
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Moana 2 is one of just two 2024 theatrical animated films from major studios to star a character of colour as the lead. How much of a priority is diversity for you?
It’s so critical for audiences to see themselves represented on screen. At the same time, I think our stories have to resonate worldwide. Audiences are constantly looking for things that feel fresh or are outside of their direct knowledge base. I think for many reasons, a story like Moana is something that people gravitate towards because most people worldwide aren’t as familiar with the cultures of the Pacific Islands. In the future, continuing these stories is important and it’s not just what is shown in front of the camera, it’s also making sure that behind the camera we are hopefully bringing people together in a way to tell these stories that feels right, and then getting a lot of help from the community itself. Our oceanic story trust is a great example of that.
How do you provide a strong support structure for people of colour coming into the studio?
Our films are always difficult, no matter who you are. Across the board, it is a massive undertaking. Our movies typically have a crew of at least 700 if not more, but it’s also hyper collaborative. Every movie I’ve worked on here, if you’re a writer, if you’re a director, any role you play in that film, you are getting help and support constantly. I had nothing but help and support when I first joined Disney Animation. The first couple years, I was just being mentored on how to do my job at Disney animation. Knowing that our films have to resonate worldwide, that there’s no version of this being easy for anybody, and making it a normal thing to get help, to lean on others, and then also to share that knowledge moving forward.
How do you measure the success of a film?
It’s really difficult to measure it, but I think asking, “Does it resonate with people? Does it matter to people?” is key. That’s not always a box office number or critical response, it’s a gut feeling on how that went. I think that is a big part of it. I have three boys and they are truth tellers. I have a sense of how it’s going from them and whether it’s resonating for them or not. They’ll tell me whether something stinks or not.. But more than anything else it takes years and years of hundreds of people’s lives to make a film like this and whether that is the crew at Burbank, whether that is the amazing cast, not only the English speaking cast, but its casts around the world who have to come together, our amazing songwriters and composers, if they would watch their work and be proud of it, that’s the highest metric.
Moana 2 is out in cinemas now