Tuesday, April 29, 2025

This is the thirty-second installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

My family and I recently watched Moana 2, the aptly-named sequel to Moana 1. The first movie is one of my wife’s favorites, so we went into the second one with low expectations, especially for a Disney sequel. Common Sense Media and Plugged In both said it was all right, so we gave it a try.

This isn’t an extensive review, you can find that in lots of other places. There will also be some minor spoilers. What I was surprised about was how pro-life the movie really was. Moana has a younger sister, despite the visible gray hair and age lines on both of her parents. There are also some possible issues with fertility with her parents, considering the sixteen year age gap between the siblings. Age is also celebrated through an older island farmer joining the main party, who was chosen for his wisdom and experience.

The other important point about the movie is that it’s about bringing people together. The main plot is that the Polynesian storm god had cut off a system of ocean currents that used to connect the islanders together, and the heroes have to break a curse and restore the connections between the people. This was also the main idea in Raya and the Last Dragon, another surprisingly wholesome Disney movie that we also recently watched. In Raya, the tribes were divided over a magical gem and turned on each other, and it wasn’t until a main character makes a major sacrifice that they could all reconcile and unite as a people.

Both of these movies seem to be direct responses to COVID. We were all separated in various ways, both physically and emotionally, and now we need to work on reuniting and coming together again as a people. Ironically, this has been something of a hindrance for me personally, since I work remotely for a company that’s still based in Idaho. When COVID happened, we were all sent home, and we took that as an opportunity to work from home in another state rather than nearby. Now that I’m considering changing jobs, there are far fewer opportunities for remote work than there were even two years ago. Companies want people in front of each other, not lined up on screens for Zoom calls. When I worked in an office, I had what could reasonably be called friendships with some of my co-workers, and now I don’t really connect with any of the people I work with remotely. Connection is critical, and it will be even more so going forward.