I watched Moana again recently and was reminded what a good movie it is. A large part of that is definitely the weird enjoyment I get from finding out that certain actors or celebrities have good singing voices. So naturally, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson playing the voice of Maui the demi-god was my favorite part.

The other, much more significant reason that I enjoyed the movie was it's setting. The entire storyline is centered around a young girl from the Pacific islands who has this innate urge to travel beyond the confines of the island she's lived her entire life on. She seems to share this desire with no one else on the island aside from her grandmother; the rest of the islanders insist traveling beyond "the reef" is dangerous and nothing good can come of it. But her need to explore can't be cured, and she sets out on her own to find the demigod Maui who she believed responsible for cursing her island. 

The part that caught my attention the most was the lore and culture Moana belongs to. Her whole world is deep rooted in tradition and purpose and connectedness. The movie did an incredible job of portraying that sense of belonging. It made me desire the chance to belong to something much bigger and older and deeper than I am.

There are so many people in the world that have that culture they belong to; The Nordic people have Viking ancestry, Native Americans have a deep culture, the Grecians, the Romans, the Japanese, the list goes on and on.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand how lucky I am to have been born in a first world country into a family of relative means. I'm lucky to be a white person, a male and an American. But being white is not always a great thing, being male certainly has some negative connotations, and America has only been around for a infinitesimal amount of years (comparatively speaking).

If I can get a sense of what that kind of culture feels like from a fictional movie about fictional people from a fictional island, I can only imagine what it feels like to belong to something as old and as real as that.