Review

Culture

Film & TV

Migration

5 December 2024

4 min read

What do Moana and Paddington have in common?

Families, destinies, and the voyage between.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A cartoon still shows a nightscape at sea with a Polynesian style vessel above, with Moana standing on it sailing above a whale illuminated by bioluminescence

Disney.

Watching Moana 2 in a packed cinema filled with little girls giggling with excitement at every slapstick moment in the film was the highlight of my weekend. It was Saturday afternoon and my foster daughter and I found ourselves surrounded by several birthday parties of local children, many dressed up in leis and straw skirts, and exuding the sun-kissed tropical holiday vibe.

I wasn’t expecting much from this sequel beyond a welcome reunion of characters from the original film, and I was certainly right not to raise my hopes when it came to the songs – they pale into obscurity in comparison to the excellent soundtrack of the first film. However, Moana 2 definitely put the wind in my sails - as well as made me reconsider getting a tattoo.

Having just seen Paddington in Peru, released two weeks earlier, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. Two much-loved characters, two long-awaited sequels, and two films about origin story journeys. While the Peruvian bear crosses one ocean following a letter from his Great Aunt Lucy, Polynesian Moana crosses another following a more supernatural call from her ancestors. Both find themselves in small boats on dangerous waters, wondering if they’ll ever find their long-lost family, and what sort of welcome awaits them.

The quest to discover family roots seems to resonate widely – but for children in foster care it is especially pertinent. There is a very moving moment in Paddington in Peru where he asks himself where he really belongs – the place where he was born, or the place he has come to see as home?

The tension in Moana is similar - between the home she’s left behind, and the connection she is trying to find with her ancestors. Her quest for identity and purpose lies at the heart of the movie. As Maui sings: “Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya gonna be? Come on-a, Moana – go get your destiny.”

These travellers aren't seen as strange outsiders or potential threats; instead, they're embraced as long-lost family. Their treacherous journeys are honoured, not criticised.

Both my father and my father-in-law have spent a lot of time documenting our family histories. On my side of the family, I have historical connections with Sri Lanka, India, Ireland, and Malaysia, and cousins who have recently made their homes in Australia and Cambodia. On my wife’s side of the family, there are direct descendants of the Huguenots, who found sanctuary in England after fleeing religious persecution in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is both fascinating and heart-breaking to discover how our lives are part of a history of global people movements, and the struggles that they inevitably bring with them. I grew up hearing stories of my Indian grandmother’s tragic separation from her children after her husband – an English tea plantation owner – was killed in El Alamein in World War Two. I grew up hearing stories of my mother being sent out barefoot to collect water for the orphanage in the Himalayas where she lived. I grew up hearing stories of my father who as a child, 5,000 kilometres away from my mother, was woken at 5am each day to be taken to the temple.

However difficult it is for me to imagine, their stories are part of my story. And they in turn are part of an even bigger story that offers a wider explanation not only of where we come from but where we are going. Ancestors such as Abraham, Moses, and David call us to reconnect with our family roots – and with God himself.

Moses puts it like this in a song that was passed down through the generations and recorded in the Psalms:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

For me, the quest to find out who I truly am, where I come from, where I belong, and what my destiny might be, – led me to become a Christian. In searching for identity, meaning, and purpose, I realized that "home" for me meant coming home to God.

From Abraham's journey to my parents' migration, my family's story has always been one of movement, separation, and finding belonging. Now, in my work with refugees around the world, I feel a deep personal connection not just to my own ancestors' experiences but to all those who share similar stories of displacement and hope.

That's why I loved the powerful moment in Moana 2 when a fleet of small boats arrive on the shores of a distant land to a rapturous welcome. These travellers aren't seen as strange outsiders or potential threats; instead, they're embraced as long-lost family. Their treacherous journeys are honoured, not criticised or dismissed as we often see in today's responses to migrants.

Moana is recognized as a master navigator, and, true to Polynesian custom, receives a tattoo to mark her achievement—a symbol of pride, resilience, and belonging. Her tattoo also possibly indicates that she is being set up as with demi-god powers for the trequel. But we have to wait to see if there will be a Moana 3. In the meantime, I highly recommend the film, especially if you have fostered children in your life, or fancy organising a Polynesian-themed party, or just need a healthy dose of girl-power inspiration. That should cover all of us.

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Mental Health

26 May 2025

4 min read

Why we should mourn the death of the semi-colon

In our busy, frenetic lives, we need that small pause more than ever.

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A woman stands across a busy roads, looking up from her phone in a sad way.

Su San Lee on Unsplash.

In the morning news; a headline about the decline of a species. Thankfully not a rare rhino or butterfly this time. It’s a punctuation mark. The semi-colon is an increasingly endangered creature. According to recent research it has declined in use by 50 per cent in the past two decades. This on top of a 70 per cent slide in usage between 1800 and 2000. Further research suggests that 67 per cent of students rarely use it and over 50 per cent wouldn’t know how to anyway.

I’m kind of indifferent on the merits or otherwise of the semi-colon. But I at least appreciate the option. So, its value feels worth defending. Who knows what unintended consequences in the ecology of language might occur if we lost it all together?

The semi-colon was invented in the 15th century by a scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder (whose name might have benefited from a semicolon itself). A hybrid between a comma and a colon, the semi-colon invites a pause; it’s a moment to breathe. And it opens enough space to reflect on what might be being said between what went before and what comes after. It signals a kind of meaning in the gap. It creates a hint of resonance beyond the plain meaning of the words of a sentence.

Despite its enthusiastic use by the likes of no less than Jane Austen and Charles Dickens it has certainly come in for some stick over the years. Kurt Vonnegut famously said of semi-colons ‘all they do is show you’ve been to college.’ Who knew two marks on a page could signal such elitism? The semi-colon says, ‘you're trying too hard’. Or it might just say, ‘why did you do that?’, since so many people fail to understand what it represents. Novelist John Irvine reckoned readers ‘think the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma’.

So what is killing off the semi-colon? Well, if the statistics above are to be believed it could be as simple as a decreasing understanding on how to use it. Though of course there are feedback loops here. We learn grammar and punctuation as much by reading as by being taught. Others point the finger at the breathless world of social media. As more and more of our communication is constrained by space and time, the semi-colon’s quiet request for a pause for consideration is being largely ignored.

We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments .

If this is the case then the semi-colon is another species within a kind of mass extinction which is the result of the great acceleration of our age, alongside the coffee break, lunch break, walk round the block and long stare out of the window. These are simply things that we don’t have time for anymore; we wonder if they had any value in the first place. The semi-colon is largely being replaced by the dash. Which is pretty ironic when you think about it.

Perhaps concern over the loss of this little mark is in an awareness that it’s a kind of canary in the gold mine of our culture of acceleration. The loss of the semi-colon is a sign of the loss of something far more significant: the rhythms and cadences of our lives that afford pause, reflection; that open up the kind of spaces where creativity; meaning; imagination; spirituality happen.

The semi-colon reminds me, strangely, of the Hebrew psalms. The monastic tradition includes regular communal singing (or saying) of the psalms. Typically, these poems, which formed such a key part of Hebrew worship, work on the basis of what is known as parallelism. Essentially each thought in a psalm is composed as a sentence in two lines. The two halves of these sentences are parallel, in the sense that they both make statements about the same thing. Sometimes these statements say the same thing differently. Sometimes one half of the sentence builds on another. There are endless creative ways in which the psalmists use this simple device.

When psalms are used in prayer or worship parallelism is often observed by introducing a pause at the end of the first half of the sentence. It's an odd tradition if you are not used to it. An established monastic community naturally feels the length of pause together. Visitors to a service in a monastery often end up coming in early.

Yet, with time you begin to realise these pauses are a wonderful thing. The pauses create a rhythm and time signature that invites reflection. The pause says ‘take your time, there’s a lot of meaning here in all these similes and metaphors, what might they mean to you?’ Perhaps even ‘what, in this moment to breathe, might God be saying to you?’

There’s a feeling for so many of us that life is starting to feel a bit like the final chapter of James Joyces’ Ulysses: devoid of punctuation. We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments. And we need to learn how to use them. We need practices that make space for the undervalued attributes of reflection, daydreaming, prayer. In that sense saying the psalms may be a practice worth giving time to.

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