This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Before Moana was a script, it was a research trip. Directors John Musker and Ron Clements spent part of the film's five year development traveling through the Pacific, meeting anthropologists, historians, fishermen and linguists who eventually formed what the production called the Oceanic Story Trust. Every version of the script, nine of them over the course of development, went back to that group for review before it moved forward.
The effort shows in specific, checkable choices. Voice roles went to performers of Polynesian descent, including Aulii Cravalho as Moana and Dwayne Johnson as Maui. Maori filmmaker Taika Waititi worked on an early draft of the story. And Moana herself was built with realistic proportions and her own agency driving the plot, deliberately breaking from the romantic rescue arc that shaped many earlier Disney heroines, a choice reviewers and Pacific commentators alike have credited as a genuine departure.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it was free. A five year production timeline and a standing review process are real costs a studio does not have to pay, and Moana paid them in a way earlier Disney films depicting other cultures largely had not.
What this article does not claim is that consultation settled every question the film raised. A companion article on this page records the specific, named Pacific criticism the film still drew, particularly over Maui's redesigned body and a costume built from it. The two records are not in tension. A genuine, well resourced consultation process and a genuine, specific failure inside its results can both be true of the same film, and an honest account keeps both rather than letting the process stand in for the outcome.