Something to watch tonight: Monday 11 September

Te Reo Māori versions of Moana, Frozen and The Lion King are streaming on Disney+ Aotearoa

For sub­scribers in Aotearoa New Zealand – which makes 99% of you accord­ing to the Substack dash­board – today marks the begin­ning of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week).

Te Mana Whakaatu / The New Zealand Classification Office has done their bit by recom­mend­ing five recent films that show­case the lan­guage but I wanted to make the fairly obvi­ous point that there are three thor­oughly enter­tain­ing films on Disney+ that are 100 per­cent te reo and ready to go.

Thanks to a part­ner­ship between Disney and Matewa Media we have Moana, Frozen and the ori­gin­al Lion King avail­able online (with Coco in cinemas earli­er this year and Encanto to come) all fea­tur­ing an abund­ance of loc­al tal­ent and all just as much fun as the originals.

Coco Reo Māori was one of the early Friday reviews here – before we had very many sub­scribers – and I said this at the time:

The screen­ing I shared on Thursday was full of a big group of young kohanga reo kids and their mind­ers and it was a thrill to be around an occa­sion that so clearly exem­pli­fies what makes this coun­try dif­fer­ent. There was so much pop­corn and Coke for the lit­tlies that they needed a shop­ping trol­ley to bring it all in to the cinema. A joy­ous, sugar-fuelled occasion.

Coco made me cry the first time I saw it and it did so again, des­pite the lack of English sub­titles for the reo. I’m not just giv­ing this a good review because they gave me a free ice cream when they dis­covered they’d over ordered for the kids but that cer­tainly did not hurt.

One of the things about Coco that sur­prised me was how so many of the visu­al assets had been trans­lated, not just the vocal ones, but on reflec­tion I real­ised that the Disney pro­duc­tion machine has to be optim­ised to provide sim­ul­tan­eous loc­al­isa­tions for dozens of ter­rit­or­ies. We’re just lucky that Matewa has per­suaded them to include such a relatively-small-but-perfectly-formed audi­ence here in Aotearoa.

Facebook

To help me pro­mote this news­let­ter to new read­ers I have been send­ing out links and extracts through vari­ous social media – so many now! – but only Facebook has a ded­ic­ated feed for Funerals & Snakes.

If you are a Facebook user, I’d appre­ci­ate you hop­ping over there to give us a ‘like’ and a ‘share’ to help spread the word.

Ngā mihi nui.