Something to watch tonight: Monday 11 September
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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.
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.