Then came the casting for Moana herself. Hundreds auditioned. They needed a voice that was young but weathered, curious but strong, gentle but capable of commanding a demigod. They found her in Maisha Kanna, a 16-year-old actress from Bandung with a surprisingly resonant alto. Maisha had never sailed a day in her life, but she understood the feeling of being pulled between a parent’s expectations and an inner compass. Her first read of "How Far I’ll Go" left the sound engineers in stunned silence.
But the true test was the demigod, Maui. The original, voiced by Dwayne Johnson, was a mountain of charisma. The Indonesian team needed a giant. They cast Iszur Muchtar, a veteran actor famous for his booming laugh and his ability to shift from hilarious to heartfelt in a single breath. Iszur didn't mimic The Rock. He made Maui Indonesian —a boastful, shape-shifting jawara (a local strongman) with a tragic vulnerability. His version of "You're Welcome" was a chaotic, percussive masterpiece, filled with colloquial jokes about bakso (meatball soup) and traffic jams in Jakarta. Moana Dubbing Indonesia
A little girl in the front row, maybe six years old, stood up. She didn't sing along. She just placed her small hand over her heart. Her mother, an immigrant from a coastal village in Flores, wept silently. Then came the casting for Moana herself
The first challenge arrived with the film's title: Moana . In Indonesian, the name had to feel both foreign and familiar. But the real hurdle was the music. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics were a masterpiece of English wordplay. The task of translating "How Far I’ll Go" fell to a young, bespectacled lyricist named Rizky. He knew a direct translation would be a disaster. "It's not about words," he told Dewi. "It's about rasa —the feeling." They found her in Maisha Kanna, a 16-year-old