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Before David Derrick started work as a story artist on Disney's new animated feature "Moana," he made a trip to Iosepa.

The Utah ghost town, southwest of the Great Salt Lake in Skull Valley, was where the area's first Polynesian settlers were forced to live, Derrick said. He made a rubbing of his Samoan grandmother's gravestone and put it above his desk at the Disney studios as he worked.

"It was both a thank you and an apology at the same time — thanking her for a heritage and apologizing for how she was treated when she was here," said Derrick, who was born and raised in Farmington and visited his home state this week.

"Polynesian culture is one that has been misrepresented and not fully understood," said Derrick, who signed on with Disney after a decade with DreamWorks when he heard about the project. "I saw this as a great opportunity for us to tell this story and celebrate this culture."

"Moana," which opens nationwide on Wednesday, takes viewers deep into Pacific Islander folklore. It tells of Moana, a chief's daughter who discovers her ancestors were great sailors. She follows their example to cross the seas to find a legendary island that is the source of life in the Pacific — but has turned dark and monstrous. She is helped on her journey by the mischief-making demigod Maui.

The movie's co-head of animation, Hyrum Osmond, was born in Provo (the singing Osmond brothers are his uncles, and Marie is his aunt). "I knew very little about the Polynesian culture," Osmond said. "It was interesting, coming onto this film, having no understanding of it, just how much there was to learn."

The filmmakers, led by directors Ron Clements and John Musker ("The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin"), consulted with a group of cultural experts from several Pacific islands — a group that came to be called the Oceanic Story Trust.

Several members of the crew also took trips to Samoa and other islands to steep themselves in the locations and culture. "It adds a level of sincerity to the filmmaking," Derrick said.

Osmond, who oversaw a crew of 93 animators, said there were aspects of capturing Pacific Islanders that made the animation especially challenging.

Two of the toughest things to animate, for example, are hair and water. But many Pacific Islanders have long, wavy hair, and because they live on water, that hair often gets wet. Also, the characters don't wear a lot of clothing, so the animators couldn't hide skin or muscle movement.

"All the things you're not supposed to do [in animation], because it's so challenging, we did," Osmond said.

Also, "water is a character in this film," he said. The ocean is Moana's friend, assists her on her journey and sometimes communicates with her — forming a small wave above the ocean's surface, as if to talk to her. (The animation staff nicknamed the wave Gretchen.)

Another unusual character in the film is Mini-Maui, the name given to the demigod's array of tattoos, which moves and changes — and plays the role of Maui's conscience. "We called him Jiminy Cricket with attitude," Osmond said.

Supervising the creation of Mini-Maui was a treat for Osmond, because the character was animated by Eric Goldberg, who animated the Genie in "Aladdin" — which Osmond credits as the movie that made him want to be an animator. "I'm in the trenches with the very guy who inspired me to do this," he said.

The filmmakers were determined to find Polynesian actors to voice the characters. Maui is voiced by superstar (and People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive") Dwayne Johnson, who is Samoan on his mother's side. For the title role, after an exhaustive search, the filmmakers picked Auli'i Cravalho, an Oahu native who turns 16 on Tuesday — the day before the movie's release.

"Finding Auli'i was so good," Derrick said, adding that finding someone who could act and sing was nearly impossible. "She's the exact same age as our protagonist. … She has this vulnerability that only a 15-year-old can have. And it came across, in her singing and her acting."

Being a story artist, Derrick said, is one of the more thankless jobs in animation. They're the ones who create the initial drawings of characters and settings, which are used to visualize the script before it's animated.

"We're like the Marines: We're the first to go in and sometimes the last to come out," he said.

Derrick said a lot of a story artist's work gets scrapped — it's cheaper to kill an idea early, before it becomes animated — but when one's work makes it into the final movie, it's an amazing feeling.

"It's like Christmas Day when you see your scene animated," he said. "It's something that has been planned out and staged, and then it's alive, and these characters are real and you believe them."