Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear were big fans of “Moana” — and its earworm-y songs — when they saw the film as teenagers in 2016.
So when Disney floated the idea, eight years later, of the TikTok duo writing songs for the sequel “Moana 2,” “we were over the moon,” Barlow said.
The pair, 20-somethings who grew up far from the coast — Birmingham, Ala., for Barlow, and Rockford, Ill., for Bear — were known for their TikTok smash “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,” which won the Grammy Award for best musical theater album in 2022.
But when faced with the prospect of writing an entire animated film score from scratch, they “were mirroring struggles that Moana was going through,” said Barlow, 26, a pop songwriter and singer who had never written for the screen.
Her partner was not as green. Bear, 23, was a protégée of the producer Quincy Jones, a pianist on Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour and composer of the score for the 2023 Netflix family adventure “Dog Gone.” Still, the “Moana 2” assignment “was a lot of pressure,” she said, before adding, “But when you have pressure, it pushes you to write something that you never thought you were even capable of writing before.”
In the sequel, Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) sets out to find Pacific Islanders beyond her own island — and meets the bat-themed underworld goddess Matangi. But there are also new friends: Moni (Hualālai Chung), a mega fan of the egotistical demigod Maui; the engineer Loto (Rose Matafeo); and a little sister, Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda). All of them deliver Barlow and Bear’s pop-inflected Polynesian tunes.
After setting a record for the best opening weekend for an animated movie at the global box office in November, “Moana 2” is nearing $1 billion in ticket sales. Even better for Bear and Barlow, their tune “Beyond” is on the Oscar shortlist for best original song. The wildfire-delayed Academy Award nominations are set to be announced on Jan. 23.
In an interview at the Walt Disney Studios office in Lower Manhattan, the duo — who became the first all-female songwriting team to write the songs for a Disney animated film, as well as the youngest — discussed their inspirations, among them Beyoncé, “Beauty and the Beast” and the jazz flute solo in “Anchorman.”
‘Beauty and the Beast’
Before writing the opening numbers for both “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” and “Moana 2,” Bear said, she and Barlow had a ritual: They listened to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s “Belle,” from the 1991 animated movie “Beauty and the Beast.”
The tune checks all the boxes for a movie musical opening, she said: It begins with the main character telling us exactly what she wants, introduces everyone who is important to her, and is “catchy as hell.”
“It’s just masterfully crafted,” Barlow added.
Te Vaka
Barlow and Bear’s knowledge of Polynesian music was initially limited to the songs they had heard in “Moana.”
“We started with Te Vaka” — the South Pacific fusion band that collaborated with the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on the songs for the first film — “and then just started going down a Spotify rabbit hole,” Bear said.
“We made a running playlist,” Barlow said — which included the Village People’s “Macho Man” — when they were working on music for Maui, who is voiced by Dwayne Johnson. “We’d play it in the car.”
Bear in particular was taken with Te Vaka’s characteristic log drum grooves, which inspired the harmonic and melodic structures for “a bunch of songs,” she said.
Members of Te Vaka later collaborated with Barlow and Bear.
“They vocal arrange on the spot,” Barlow said. “It’s wild. It’s like this telepathic magic.”
Moana Herself
Bear and Barlow aren’t that much older than the 19-year-old Moana, and they could often relate to her plight, even if theirs didn’t involve fighting lava or sea monsters.
“We were going through a big life change when we got hired on this — we were struggling with a lot of things,” Barlow said. (Netflix sued them in 2022 over “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical”; the company later dropped the lawsuit and the parties reached a settlement.) “And Moana was going through weirdly similar struggles of finding her way in the world as a young woman.”
Their not-too-distant adolescence also proved useful in another aspect: Coaching Johnson through the inspirational “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” they wrote for his character.
“We were in the booth, and I said, ‘Just think of what you’d tell your own daughter if you had no idea what to do,’” Bear said. “And he crushed it.”
‘Anchorman’
Maui’s flaming conch concert during “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” is partly inspired by the jazz flute solo in the 2004 Will Ferrell comedy “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”
“Because who doesn’t want to play a flaming conch solo to 27,000 mudskippers?” said Bear, who mixed a jazz flute with various synths for the number.
Beyoncé
It’s not hard for a global pop superstar’s style to rub off on you when you’re composing a soundtrack by day while performing in her tour by night.
“I’m sure that was an influence,” Bear said, singling out the song “Get Lost” for the underworld goddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).
“Matangi’s not a classic Disney villain,” said Barlow, who also mentioned pop divas like Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and Shania Twain as influences. “Matangi is a diva. She is extra. So we wanted to give her a crazy song.”
George Watsky
Miranda had some advice for the duo: Don’t be afraid to lean into your favorites.
For Barlow, that was the lightning-fast raps of George Watsky, whom she watched on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” when she was growing up.
“His raps were like slam poetry,” she said. “I would memorize them and recite them as a party trick.”
That proved useful when she and Bear were writing the rap for the new character of Loto, the engineer who designs and maintains Moana’s ship during the quest.
“The filmmakers and us both agreed that Loto was not really a singer,” Barlow said. “So we knew we wanted her to break out in this insane rap.”
Alan Menken
While Barlow’s go-to source of inspiration is Shakira, Bear’s is an Alan Menken power ballad.
“My favorite moment in a Disney film is when they hit that note, the strings swell, the orchestra booms,” she said. “‘Go the Distance’ from ‘Hercules’ is one of my favorite songs ever.”
“That was my one requirement for ‘Beyond,’” she added, referring to the shortlisted song that is Moana’s big number. “I was like, ‘We need that moment.’ And I think that was what we got at the very end when Moana hits that last chord, and everything booms, and it’s like, ‘AH!’”
