‘The real deal’: Aussie performer Catherine Laga’aia dazzles in new Moana trailer

In the trailer for the new Disney live-action adaptation of Moana, the teenage monarch-in-waiting – played by Australian actress Catherine Laga’aia – faces her greatest peril and must stand up to be counted. “I’m not a princess,” she declares. “I’m the daughter of the chief and the leader of my people.”

The 16-year-old fictional heroine may not be cut from the classic cloth of Disney princesses, but the declaration she makes sounds almost like a statement of identity. So, is this heresy in the Magic Kingdom? Or just the making of a modern woman in a modern world, albeit one born in the fictional Polynesian island village of Motunui?

“Moana fits beautifully into the canon of Disney and also has many elements of it that are quite distinct from some other Disney films,” the film’s director Thomas Kail said. “So much of this is about being two things and finding identity, and what we see in ourselves and what others see in us.

“At that moment, she has to stand for herself and say, well, I’m actually something a little different than you think, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re still talking about Moana,” Kail added. “Her power and her ferocity are certainly those leading characteristics for her.”

At a little over two minutes, the trailer is our first proper glimpse of the live-action world based on the much-loved animated film. It is also our first proper glimpse of Laga’aia – the 19-year-old daughter of actor Jay Laga’aia – in a film role which is set to transform her professional career. As first movie gigs go, it’s not exactly small.

Kail described Catherine as the real deal. “I’ve been doing this for somehow quite a long time, I guess, almost 25, 26 years now, and I’ve had many people in a little rehearsal room where world had a chance to experience their virtuosity, their energy, their talent, and Catherine has that,” he said.

“Anything she does after this, this is high-altitude training, anything she could be asked to do in a motion picture, she is being asked to do in her very first, including act opposite Mr Dwayne Johnson,” Kail added. “She’s unfailing, and she’s unblinking, and she just rose to meet each moment. The trailer was a chance to give a little sample of that.”

Kail, 49, is primarily a Broadway director whose credits include Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musicals In the Heights and Hamilton (which won him the 2016 Tony Award for best direction of a musical) and the television series Fosse/Verdon. Kail also directed Grease: Live for US television, and is working on a screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof for Amazon MGM Studios.

He might be uniquely qualified to answer one of pop culture’s great conundrums: do you stick the “canon”, and risk failing to elevate or evolve the work, or do you gamble with the audience’s fragile sensibilities by changing it.

“It’s certainly one of the large and existential questions about this kind of endeavour,” Kail said. “I’m here because I love the original film and the characters and the architecture of that story. And I also know that because of the existence of our film and telling the story with flesh and blood and putting human beings in it, that it is inherently a completely different kind of experience.

“We wanted to trust all of the things that work and also be unafraid to try out some [new things],” he said. “We tried to be as courageous as we could in that regard, and also trust the material.”

The trailer, Kail said, is designed to “give the audience a sense of the spirit of the film, of its adventure, of its humour. One of the things we were really excited about … is to show how epic it is. This is a big story. If you do a musical, you don’t often expect it to also have a lava monster, a singing crab, and animals on the ocean. This one really gives you everything.”

The fact that the director of the film has a media schedule to accompany the release of the trailer is confirmation we’re living in a new world. One where even the trailer gets its own junket. What’s next? The trailer gets a trailer? That’s a tour rider we’re still trying to wrap our heads around.

“You make things, and you know at a certain point that you walk away, and you say, oh, I wish. I’m only as good as that day lets me be,” Kail said. “It’s been a joyous collaboration because we made the movie, and then we try to go make this [trailer] and put out something that will, as you say, have its own life. It gets out there first to hopefully lead the way. That’s certainly new for me. There are not as many trailers on Broadway.”

Moana will be released in cinemas in Australia on July 8.

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