Disney's next princess movie isn't due until 2018, but there's already fan art to enjoy. A leaked piece of concept art was retracted because, according to Disney, it wasn't an official release. We don't know how much development has gone into the character or the story, but Disney movie fans all over the internet have responded by giving us their own visions to Moana.
The animated musical will tell the story of a young Polynesian sea-voyager and navigator, Moana Waialiki, and will be directed by the creators of The Princess and the Frog, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. It apparently includes Moana going on an epic journey and meeting demi-gods from what the Disney wiki somewhat oxymoronically describes as “real mythology.”
Not much else is known about the film (because, you know, it isn’t out for another four years), but the fact that Moana will be Disney’s first Polynesian sea-voyaging princess is enough for many people to be majorly psyched already.
Read about what we know and what we don't know about the character, and what fans are hoping for, at The Daily Dot.
(Image credit: Kat Hudson)
My personal favorite definition is by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell who defines a myth as any story that helps guide us in living our lives, which can encompass everything from fact to fiction and all the gray zones in between and beyond.
From this view we can see that literally every part of our lives is an assemblage of ideas/knowledge/stories that inform us in our existence within our worlds and cultures and that truth becomes a less important qualification in light of the utility of the story.
There was that recent hubbub around Reza Aslan's recent book Zealot (about the life and times of Jesus) and in an interview he said some very astute things about the distinction between Facts and Truths -- in summary, all facts are true, but not all truths are facts (as in empirically provable/proven as of yet). There's a nice bit about this regarding theology vs science in the movie Contact: prove that you love someone. Anyway, I'm going off on tangents, but I think mythology is actually the most central aspect of our lives and we view our own myths as True Stories and other people's stories as Myths. Ultimately what matters is how it informs us as humans and how we are able to live our lives. :-)
If this interests you, I highly recommend AM Hocart's The Life-Giving Myth and Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By. Additionally, but different, I highly recommend Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, regarding the ways in which we think and perceive and how we encode our impressions of the real world in words. Thanks for bearing with me on this geek out by me :-)
Before defining the term "mythology" one needs to define the meaning of the word "myth". The word itself comes from the Greek "mythos" which originally meant "speech" or "discourse" but which later came to mean "fable" or "legend". In this document the word "myth" will be defined as a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society.
Furthermore, in the context of this document, all myths are, at some stage, actually believed to be true by the peoples of the societies that used or originated the myth. Our definition is thus clearly distinguished from the use of the word myth in everyday speech which basically refers to any unreal or imaginary story.
A myth is also distinctly different from an allegory or parable which is a story deliberately made up to illustrate some moral point but which has never been assumed to be true by anyone.
Some myths describe some actual historical event, but have been embellished and refashioned by various story tellers over time so that it is impossible to tell what really happened. In this last aspect myths have a legendary and historical nature.
Learn something new every day - thanks Robin!