In 2011 John Musker and Ron Clements, the writer-director team responsible for Disney’s animated film Moana, took the first of many research trips to Polynesia, interviewing elders and community members from Samoa, Tahiti and Fiji. It was the beginning of a five-year endeavour to ensure that Moana, a film about a young heroine in a nonspecific region of Polynesia, would do better at depicting Indigenous people and people of colour than Disney had done in the past.

That same year Disney opened the doors to its $800m Aulani resort, part of the Ko Olina resort development on O’ahu in Hawaii. Dressed in an aloha shirt and flip flops, Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, said, “We have committed ourselves to ensuring that Aulani is respectful and appreciative of the unique Hawaiian culture and traditions.”

This bastion of luxury sits at the gateway to the predominantly native Hawaiian communities of the Waianae coast, one of the most economically disadvantaged areas in Hawaii. Standard room rates start at more than $500 a night.

In the midst of a heated conversation about whitewashing in Hollywood, Moana’s creators Musker and Clements have touted their efforts, encouraged by Disney’s creative chief, John Lasseter, to get Polynesian culture right. Whereas, by their own admission, their research for Aladdin consisted of a visit to a Saudi Arabian expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, for Moana, they worked with a hand-selected group of cultural consultants, later dubbed the Oceanic story trust.

But the veneer of “culture” has always been an important part of colonial profit-making in the Pacific. Think tiki torches, hula skirts and lu’au. As it turns out, “authenticity” makes for even better marketing, and Moana is just one of the Polynesian products that the corporation is hoping to sell.

As the Māori scholar Tina Ngata argues, Moana is a “very flash-looking, prolonged advertisement for a merchandise and tourism machine” that includes the 351-room Aulani resort, 481 Disney Vacation Club timeshare units in Aulani, and talks of regular cruise ship routes through the Hawaiian Islands. Moana’s release has sparked a flurry of travel articles about the island “destinations” that inspired the movie’s vibrant landscapes. Auli’i Cravalho, the native Hawaiian actor who voices Moana, gave insider Hawaii holiday tips to the New York Times, and Disney partnered with Hawaiian Airlines to promote the film. Pacific Business News came right out with it in an article: “Disney’s ‘Moana’ an advertisement for Hawaii tourism”.

‘It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to see “the Darkness” that threatens Moana’s island as an unintentional allegory for an exploitative industry.’ Photograph: Disney

The problem here is that this merchandise and tourism machine operates in direct opposition to the morals of Moana, a young girl who cares fiercely for her people and her island – both of which face the threat of ecological destruction. This story is not unfamiliar to people who call the Pacific home. Rising sea levels, depleted fisheries, and intensifying storms have already had an impact on Pacific peoples. And while Moana supposedly gives voice and representation to those struggles, its release not only helps to drive the expansion of Disney’s carbon-intensive global tourism empire but also fuels a mass market of plastic merchandise that epitomises the very culture of consumption responsible for our planet’s environmental crisis.

As a non-Indigenous settler who calls Hawaii home, it’s not for me to decide whether Disney succeeded in accurately representing Polynesian cultures in Moana. But having grown up in the islands, it’s easy to see that these contradictions have real, material impacts for the people of the Pacific, and Hawaii in particular, because they promote and legitimise the consumption of native lands, waters and culture by non-native peoples. And the desire for environmentally and culturally sustainable alternatives to the tourism economy is real.

In a 2010 survey by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, 60% of Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) respondents feel that the tourism industry is detrimental to the survival of their culture. Why?

Consider for a moment that the caricatured likeness of Maui, a demigod in a living religion, is now plastered on to fossil fuel-powered jets that cart thousands of tourists to Hawaii from the United States – the country responsible for the illegal overthrow, annexation and continued occupation of the sovereign Hawaiian kingdom.

Many of these tourists then take a shuttle or rental car to Aulani resort, part of a master-planned development that was vehemently opposed by the native Hawaiian community when it began in the 1980s and 90s. The activist Puanani Burgess recalls in the book A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, the “development was going to change how life was lived on the coast by changing the coastline. Their plan called for building lagoons because there was no natural beach … They were going to change the landscape of the ocean and the ability for fishermen to fish.”

Indeed, today, guests of Aulani and other Ko Olina resorts are directed to human-made lagoons blasted out of living reefs that once fed generations of Kanaka Maoli families. They play golf on manicured greens fed with water that is desperately needed by native Hawaiian farmers on the Waianae coast. They lounge by the pool, drinking mai tais served by the descendants of Maui, whom – they may be unaware – is not a creation of the Disney imagineers, but a revered ancestor of many Kanaka Maoli.

‘The caricatured likeness of Maui, a demigod in a living religion, is now plastered on to fossil fuel-powered jets that cart thousands of tourists to Hawaii from the United States.’ Photograph: Disney

And all the while, just a short drive down the coast, a homeless encampment of more than 200 people, most native Hawaiian, continues to grow.

When you view Moana in the context of Hawaii’s dependence on mass tourism, it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to see “the Darkness” that threatens Moana’s island as an unintentional allegory for an exploitative industry that continues to devour land and resources for resort development.

Investors come in, buy up land, promise low-paying but much-needed service jobs, quash opposition with expensive legal battles and endless appeals, then appropriate Hawaiian culture to brand their resorts as unique destinations. Meanwhile, housing prices rise, wages stagnate, resources dwindle and profit is funnelled out of the islands and back into corporate pockets. At Ko Olina this cycle began in the 80s, and continues today with plans for one of the world’s most expensive resorts.

Through tourism, land values in Hawaii are dislocated from the needs of the local economy, contributing to an affordable-housing shortage that has resulted in the highest per capita homeless rate and the highest cost of living in the US. Kanaka Maoli carry a disproportionate share of this burden, often being priced out of their own homelands.

Of course, Moana is not directly responsible for any of this and, for many, the movie and its heroine are still a win for diversified representation. But applauding Disney for profiting from Polynesian stories paints the corporation’s presence in the Pacific as benevolent, and erases the struggles of Polynesians who are working tirelessly to survive in their homelands and reclaim their own, rich storytelling traditions from colonialism.