From Moana to Vaiana: Voicing the French and Tahitian Dubbed Versions of Disney's Moana

Since the 1990s, international box-office revenue has come to account for an increasingly large share of the major Hollywood studios’ theatrical profits, particularly for animated and family-oriented feature films.1 Reflecting this broader trend in the media industries over the last two decades, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ feature films have consistently derived 60 percent or more of total box-office income from international markets. As global film markets have become critical to Disney’s boxoffice success, the studio has concomitantly expanded its efforts significantly to localize its animated features for non-English-language audiences through voice dubbing. Since its establishment in 1988, the studio’s dubbing division, Disney Character Voices International (henceforth DCVI), has not only dramatically expanded its dubbing production budgets but also roughly doubled the number of dubbed versions it produces of each Disney animated feature. For example, whereas The Lion King (1994) was originally dubbed into fifteen languages, DCVI now routinely crafts upward of forty dubbed versions of each new Disney animated feature film. Indeed, Moana (2016), the focus of this study, was dubbed into a record forty-six languages and dialects. The studio’s heightened allocation of resources to its dubbing operations speaks not only to largescale economic trends in the global film industry but also to an awareness