‘Moana’ comes to life: Inside the making of Disney’s film with Dwayne Johnson, Catherine Lagaaia<\/a><\/p>\n“I loved Moana ever since I was a little girl, I practically grew up with her. I was her for my very first Halloween and I’ve just always been told I look just like her by my family,” she said.<\/p>\n
Masoli said she’s very grateful to be able to represent her culture and be a source of representation for young girls.<\/p>\n
“All little girls, they all have a piece of Moana in them worldwide, they’re all leaders, they’re all beautiful, they’re kind, they’re smart. And I hope they all know that, and they learn that they can do so many things,” she said. “My family, my friends have supported me along my journey, and especially with God. In the Samoan culture, we have a saying ‘Muamua Le Atua,’ which is God is First, and it just means a lot that this is my first movie, a Disney film! I love Disney!”<\/p>\n
Masoli used to live in American Samoa for several years and in the Bay Area has learned a lot about her culture from going to events and watching dancing performances.<\/p>\n
“It just made me who I am today,” she said.<\/p>\n
You can watch the full interview with Masoli above.<\/p>\n
Disney is the parent company of this station.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2026 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco Bay Area native 11-year-old Amaya Masoli, who’s starring as young Moana in Disney’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[158440,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-394046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-158440","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}