Sacred Subtexts: Depictions of Girls as Christ Figure and Holy Fool in the Films Moana and Whale Rider

Abstract

Christ figures and holy fools are familiar religious symbols often repeated and adapted in film making. They have historically most often been depicted as male, and among the slowly growing body of female filmic christ figures, they are usually depicted as adult White women. In this article, I consider two films, Niki Caro’s Whale Rider and Disney’s Moana, in which young Indigenous girls are depicted within this trope. I engage in close reading of the films, in relation to Anton Karl Kozlovic’s theoretical framework for structural characteristics of the filmic christ figure, as I focus my discussion here on the christological symbolism of the two female child figures in these films, while also folding this back to the long-standing religious and literary tradition of the holy fool. The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work about the representation and reading of women and religion in film.