‘Moana 2’ becomes the highest-grossing animation movie of all time at South African box office [VIDEO]

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Moana 2 also had the highest opening weekend of any animated film released at the East and West African box office.

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Moana 2 is the highest-grossing animated movie of all time at the South African box office.

The movie has also been a hit on the African continent; which could speak to its relatability with people of colour, as the movie is centred around Pacific islanders.

When the sequel was released on the final weekend of November last year, it became an instant hit throughout the continent.

Moana 2 became the highest opening weekend of all time for any animated film released at the East and West African box office, the highest opening weekend of 2024 at the East African box office and the second-highest opening weekend of 2024 at the West and Southern African box offices.

The second instalment of the movie sees Moana reunite with Maui for an expansive new voyage alongside a crew of unlikely seafarers.

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After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana must journey to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she’s ever faced.

ALSO READ: Maria Doyle Kennedy on ‘Recipes for Love and Murder’ S2, exploring South Africa, and local slang

Moana, a world hit

The box office success means Walt Disney Studios holds the top three films of 2024 at the Southern African box office to date, with Moana 2 joining Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine.

Further across the African continent, Moana 2 also claims the title of the highest-grossing animated film of all time in East and West Africa.

According to CNBC, Moana snared $442.8 million at the domestic box office and $567.1 million in international markets, and the company posted over the weekend.

It is the fourth film from the Walt Disney Animation arm to surpass $1 billion in ticket sales, alongside Frozen, Frozen II and Zootopia.

This feat is another feather in the cap for Disney, which had struggled in the years after the pandemic to gain traction with its animated releases.

Much of the company’s difficulties stemmed, in part, from decisions to debut a handful of animated features directly on its streaming service Disney+.

This trained parents to look for new content at home even after theatrical closures ended and films returned to cinemas.

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Trump order suspending refugee resettlement affects US Afghan allies, says advocacy group 

US & Canada

Washington —  President Trump’s executive order suspending the U.S. refugee program would affect the resettlement of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan, an advocacy group said. AfghanEvac, a California-based coalition of organizations helping U.S. Afghan allies to resettle in the U.S., said Monday that the pause in all refugee…

Things to do in Madison: The Brutalist, Hips Don’t Lie, Grown-Up Book Fair and more

Arts & Culture, Books

“The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody plays at UW Cinematheque Jan. 23. 

THURSDAY, JAN. 23That’s brutal

Watching a movie about Brutalist architecture in a Brutalist building? That’s meta. “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody as a fictional Hungarian immigrant behind the controversial architectural style, took home seven Golden Globes earlier this month. Watch the three and a half-hour epic for free Thursday at UW Cinematheque at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The show starts at 7 p.m. and includes a 10-minute intermission. No admission after 7:15 p.m.cinema.wisc.edu

Local Shakira tribute band, Hips Don’t Lie, play at High Noon Saloon Jan. 24. 

AP

FRIDAY, JAN. 24Shake it like ShakiraIt’s been 20 years since Colombian pop star Shakira made her danceable debut. On Friday, shake your hips to local tribute band Hips Don’t Lie, fronted by fellow Colombian Angela Puerta. They’ll play hits like “Whenever, Wherever,” “Loca” and “Waka Waka” at High Noon Saloon, 701 E. Washington Ave. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. The venue does not accept cash.high-noon.com

Giora Schmidt joins the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra Jan. 24. 

Dave Getzschman

FRIDAY, JAN. 24Spanish symphony

The wildfires in Los Angeles have had ripple effects across the country. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra has postponed the appearance of LA musician Anne Akiko Meyers and will instead present violinist Giora Schmidt, playing Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. The performance at 7:30 p.m. on Friday in Capitol Theater, 201 State St., will also feature Saint-Saëns’ Symphony in A major. Tickets cost $19-$97 (refunds are available for those who purchased before this change).wcoconcerts.org

“Dream at the Top of Your Lungs” plays at Broom Street Theater Jan. 24-Feb. 15. 

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FRIDAY, JAN. 24-SATURDAY, FEB. 15Dream bigFor his sixth original play at Broom Street Theater on Williamson Street, Scott Feiner takes audiences into a “slightly fictitious” relationship class for middle school boys. “Dream at the Top of Your Lungs” is about “growing up masculine” in the 2020s, and tickets are pay-what-you-can at 1119 Williamson St. The Feb. 8 performance will be livestreamed.bstonline.org

The Wisconsin Grown-Up Book Fair sets up at The Sylvee from Jan. 25-26. 

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SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JAN. 25-26Reading rainbowIf the very best day of your third grade year was when the Scholastic Book Fair took over the library, don’t miss the Wisconsin Grown-Up Book Fair this weekend at the Sylvee. Among the participating booksellers will be A Room of One’s Own, Mystery To Me, Leopold’s, Lake City Books, The Book Deal and Madison Paperbacks. Just two sessions Sunday still have tickets: from 9 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. and noon until 2:30 p.m. $20 general admission, one tote bag per purchased ticket..thesylvee.com

Cicada Books combats censorship in new banned book club

Arts & Culture, Books

Cicada Books and Coffee’s Banned Together Book Club hosted its first meeting of the new year on Tuesday, Jan. 14, opening with Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
Meeting on the second Tuesday of every month at 6:30 p.m., the club aims to create a space for conversation on censorship. Upcoming titles include “Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “The Bluest Eye,” “The Hate You Give,” “Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books,” “Flamer” and “Brave New World.” 
Dawn Helbert, the owner of Cicada Books and Coffee, hosted the meeting, and attendees discussed the moral complexities of the month’s reading. Club members debated the line between censorship and appropriateness. 
Attendees took the floor to justify how censored the piece should be, leaving members agreeing that the piece should not be available in a school library, but should remain in public libraries. Story continues below advertisement
Helbert’s perspective on the importance of banned content said there is value in the literature. 
“Most of the members are anti-book banning,” Helbert said. “If you’re reading something that’s some kind of literature, wouldn’t that be better than finding out about this controversial subject in other ways? Why not read somebody’s possibly better philosophical treatment of it?” 
She acknowledged that while age-appropriate access is important, outright banning books does more harm than good. 
“Most of the books we’ve discussed, people have agreed that there are certain age levels where maybe a kid should not have free access, but that’s no different than parental controls on internet usage,” she said.
Helbert emphasized that the club welcomes a range of perspectives, saying she hopes to give readers an opportunity to explore censored books. 
“I guess the main thing that happens is that it gives everybody that participates in it a chance to think deeper about why things are banned,” Helbert said. “What are the uses of it, what are the effects of it? So, it kind of gets everybody to think a little harder about what’s really going on with the banning of books.” 
Helbert, who opened the bookstore alongside her daughter in 2018, has now started four different book clubs. Starting with Tasty Reads, a series on food history and cookbooks during the first year of opening, and now offering Shelf Improvement, Based on a Book and Banned Together. 
As Banned Together Books continues into the new year, they hope to awaken a conversation on censorship and the themes that provoke it. 
Bethany Jarrell can be contacted at [email protected]

Thornberg: Silicon Valley, Bay Area status as nation’s tech center at risk

Technology

Over the last two years, the San Francisco Bay Area has shed 60,000 technology jobs, roughly 10% of the tech workforce at its peak in late 2022. This decline — combined with rising homelessness, empty BART trains, empty office buildings, and population declines — has led to a crisis in confidence in Silicon Valley.Is the region losing its role as the heart of the tech industry? The answer is not yet. But to understand the risks that do exist, local policymakers need to pay less attention to the short-run movement in tech jobs, and more attention to a far more worrisome dilemma: the declining labor force and an inadequate housing supply.Evidence suggests the recent decline in the Bay Area tech industry is cyclical, driven largely by the pandemic and the Federal Reserve’s response to the crisis. When COVID-19 forced Americans home, demand for social media soared. And the $5 trillion stimulus the Fed injected into the U.S. economy sent asset prices soaring and led to an enormous surge in venture capital funding into the Bay Area economy. According to data from Pitchbook, new funding more than doubled from $43 billion in 2020 to $92 billion in 2021. It’s little wonder that tech jobs leapt to all-time highs in 2022.The bubble deflatesHowever, the excessive stimulus also spurred inflation, leading the Fed to rapidly pivot from easing to tightening. The wave of VC money disappeared as fast as it showed up, and funding fell by a two-thirds between 2021 to 2023, even as vaccines conquered the pandemic and allowed people to venture back into the real world. It should be little surprise that the industry has slimmed down from those heady pandemic years.Most importantly, the worst appears to be over. VC funding is again on the upswing and tech jobs in the region have stabilized. In the meantime, the Bay Area still receives a larger share of VC funding than any other region in the nation and maintains a dominant number of tech jobs — nearly double that of Dallas and Austin.This isn’t the first time the Bay Area has seen the impact of a deflating tech bubble. The region lost almost one-third of its tech jobs between 2000 and 2004 after the dot-com equity bubble of the late 1990s burst, a proportionately steeper slide than the recent declines. Still, the Bay Area never lost its place as the heart and soul of tech in the United States.When the industry started booming again after the Great Recession, it was the Bay Area that was home to the surge. According to data from the state Employment Development Department, the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Benito doubled tech jobs from 300,000 in 2010 to 600,000 in 2022.A 10% decline from that peak seems a small-scale price to pay considering the remarkable growth over the past decade. In total, tech jobs in the Bay Area are still up 84% over the past 15 years, compared to 37% for the rest of the nation. During that time, the Bay Area’s share of the nation’s tech jobs increased from 6.9% to 9.1%.Still, do not expect another tech surge in the Bay Area — although that prediction has nothing to do with the business climate or the region’s ability to compete in the tech arena. It’s about the region’s ability to grow at all.Labor force contractsOver the past two years, tech employment losses have erased the gains of the previous three years, leaving job levels where they were in 2019. But over the same period, the Bay Area’s labor force has shrunk to levels last seen in 2016. Tech employment now uses 16% of the region’s labor supply, the highest share recorded since before the pandemic. The total labor force continues to contract even as tech jobs have stabilized. How can tech expand if there is no one in the labor force left to hire? How can startups flourish when the region’s tech titans have already snapped up the available labor force?This workforce contraction has been driven in part by the region’s shrinking population — a 150,000-person decline over the past two years. The core issue? A shortage of housing. This seems contradictory because the stock of housing has actually grown. The problem is that while population has contracted, the number of households has increased over the past five years. This was primarily driven by a sharp decline in the number of people per household, something fueled by rising incomes and demographic shifts.Bay Area leaders are right to fret about empty office buildings and declining tech employment, but they have yet to focus on the real problem and, thus, the real solution: a dramatic increase in housing supply. This problem has been acknowledged for years and is becoming increasingly critical. Housing permits in the region declined from 27,000 in 2018 to just 13,000 in the past year.As the Bay Area waffles on this acute issue, states like Texas and Washington are eagerly waiting in the wings to take companies who might prefer to stay in California, but simply can’t due to the lack of an available labor force. More housing is the key to ensuring the Bay Area’s tech industry stays on top — and time is of the essence.Christopher Thornberg  is founding partner of Beacon Economics.Originally Published: January 22, 2025 at 5:30 AM PST