On the Row Again — Moana 2

William J Hammon
9 min readDec 23, 2024

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The first Moana film was an undeniable triumph for Disney back in 2016. It featured a cool new heroine, had dazzling animation, featured a ton of great songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, and gave audiences that alchemical blend of heart and humor that Walt Disney Animation Studios used to churn out with almost effortless regularity. The story was simple but believable, the characters were fun and engaging, and Alan Tudyk “voiced” the most adorably dimwitted chicken imaginable.

However, somewhere along the line, around the same time that Moana restored the Heart of Te Fiti, thus returning her oceanic world to order, the company itself began its steady corruption, opting for the quickest of cash grabs rather than maintaining its winning focus on compelling visual storytelling. In the eight years since, the House of Mouse has oversaturated the market with all of its properties, running the likes of Marvel and Star Wars so far into the ground that they emerge in China, going all-in on one uninspired remake after the other (including greenlighting one for Moana itself less than a decade after its original release), and refocusing their animated efforts at Pixar and Disney Prime to churn out profitable sequels over new ideas.

The results have been mixed to say the least. Sure, Disney made money, and if that’s all you care about, then you can see the recent glut of mass-produced mediocrity as an unqualified success. But for those of us who grew up and continue to live in these worlds, it’s been disheartening. While there have been some high points like Soul and Encanto, most of the good stuff has been incidental to the quest to satisfy the bottom line. This year exemplified that with Inside Out 2, which was good but not great, but who cares? It doubled the domestic gross of its predecessor, so happy days, right? The audience can see that dismissive attitude in the on-screen product, to the point where we’ll fork over all the money in the world just for a taste of what made Disney great.

The latest output, Moana 2, is a continuation of that trend. It’s a perfectly adequate film. It is by no means superlative, and it doesn’t nearly approach the quality of the original. But it’s familiar, and fun, and it’s not a simmering pile of molten feces like Wish, so over the last month audiences have flocked to see it, making it the fifth-highest grossing film of the year in just four weeks.

You can see the corporate machine at work all over the film. Without Miranda on board to handle them this time, the songs are pale imitations of his work from eight years previous, including an opening number that’s a straight up copy of “The Family Madrigal,” an insipid princess yearning song called “Beyond” that insults the quality of “How Far I’ll Go” while also ripping off “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II, and Maui’s braggadocious encore literally repurposing the melody from “You’re Welcome.” Several dialogue exchanges are just callbacks to the last movie. The cast is expanded to the point that most of the newbies don’t get proper screen time, including the main villain, who is only spoken of in the main plot before he finally shows up in a mid-credits cameo.

All of this is because the picture wasn’t meant to be a feature at all. When it was announced back in 2020, it was intended as a five episode miniseries for Disney+, and it spent the next three years being developed as such. It wasn’t until early this year that the studio pivoted and Bob Iger officially relaunched the project as a theatrical film. When you know that, all of the downgrades begin to make sense. Of course the songs wouldn’t be as good, they were supposed to be for a streaming show. Of course Moana has sidekicks now, because a show needs a wider cast. Of course you don’t see the villain, because he was probably being held for a second season. Once all of this information clicks, you can kind of forgive the more obvious moments where the film falls short of its forebear, and you can just sit back and enjoy the finished product as cinematic comfort food.

And in that context, it works just fine. Three years after the last adventure, Moana (still voiced by Auli’i Cravalho, though she won’t play the role in the sure-to-be god-awful remake) has taken up a new quest. Now that she can sail the seas and explore the islands of the ocean, she’s taken it upon herself to seek out new life and new civilizations (sorry, I just watched the end of Star Trek: Lower Decks), hoping to find other tribes and unite the peoples of this vast world. However, a vengeful god of storms called Nalo (eventually voiced by Tofiga Fepulea’i), who also has beef with Maui (a returning Dwayne Johnson), has prevented this by sinking the hub island of Motufetu to the watery depths, cutting off connection and communication. Moana is warned in a vision by the spirit of her grandmother (Rachel House), as well as an ancient wayfarer (Gerald Ramsey), that if she doesn’t find a way to break Nalo’s curse and return Motufetu to the surface, then her people and culture will eventually become extinct.

Deciding that this task is too big for just herself, Moana gathers a crew, all of whom are introduced in rapid-fire fashion during the first song. There’s Loto (Rose Matafeo), who in three short years has apparently become an expert engineer and boat designer, even though her entire civilization was adamantly against exploration in the first film. Next is Moni (Hualālai Chung), who is something of a historian, but really he’s just a massive Maui fanboy. Finally, aside from Heihei the chicken (Tudyk) and Pua the pig, there’s Kele (David Fane), a grumpy farmer who’s mostly there to be the “get off my lawn” setup to much of the story’s “ok, boomer” antics. Moana bids a quick goodbye to her parents (Temuera Morrison and Nicole Shitsinger, er, Scherzinger) and her little sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), and we’re off.

Meanwhile, Maui is caught in a bit of a bind. He’s stayed away from Moana for the past three years in hopes of dealing with Nalo on his own, knowing the extent of the god’s power and his disdain for mortals. However, he finds himself in the clutches of Nalo’s enforcer, Matangi (Awhimai Fraser), a witch who has taken a particular interest in our protagonist, though her motives are initially unclear. Matangi is probably the most fun addition to the cast, mostly because her design and movements are anything but straightforward. Since she has the power to transform into and control bats, she’s given lively flight sequences and moments where her positioning and perspective shift in intriguing ways. She also gets the most entertaining and original song in the entire film, the quasi-encouraging, quasi-nonsense “Get Lost.”

Once the adventure is underway, things settle in and get properly enjoyable. Believe me, this is a great relief after so many painful winks and cringeworthy attempts to use modern youth slang in a film set in ancient Polynesia (the revelation that Moana has an entourage of “Moana-bees” on her home island was nausea-inducing, for example, to say nothing of Johnson’s forced line delivery). The animation of the water and the various wave effects are still as gorgeous as ever. While the supporting crewmates are all one-dimensional, they do provide more smiles than frowns and more story relevance than simple plot utility. When we re-encounter the coconut-like Kakamora, it’s more than just a reference and a reminder that they existed as obstacles last time out, with the diminutive warrior Kotu joining the party to add to Pua and Heihei’s mostly silent visual comedy.

Further, the overall design has matured along with the characters. Sure, Moana has a new outfit, which I’m sure is available at toy and costume shops everywhere, but beyond that you can tell that this character is three years older than when we last met her. If there was one flaw in the aesthetic of Frozen II it was that the core cast looked exactly the same as before, save for Elsa’s forced evolution into Lady Gaga. You couldn’t detect growth in their looks, and you can here. It’s a small touch, but it goes a long way towards this film being more than just a stand-in until Zootopia 2 comes out next year (for the record, I really like the first Zootopia, but I remain eternally stunned that it won the Animated Feature Oscar over Moana and Kubo and the Two Strings; it’s just not even in their league). Beyond our lead, Maui’s tattoos make for some more creative personality and gags, there’s a giant clam monster that is just glorious to behold, and Simea is kept in the film just long enough to be adorable rather than annoying. I can’t imagine how insufferable she’d be if she snuck aboard the boat and came along for the entire perilous journey, so keeping her as a cute sideline character was definitely the right choice.

Finally, I think the best part of the flick is its ending. I won’t give it away, because it’s still mathematically possible that someone out there hasn’t seen it, but it buys back a lot of the goodwill that was squandered in the more soulless aspects of the production. In addition to everything I’ve already mentioned, I have to admit that the whole story felt rushed, even though there’s really no tangible sense of urgency. Last time out, we saw rotting plant life and deteriorating fish supplies as signs that Motunui and its people were in danger. Here we just get a lightning effect (a really well-made effect, but still just an effect) along with an ominous vision. We don’t see or feel why it’s so important to save Motufetu. We just know that Moana herself has a wanderlust and the nebulous princess desire for “something more.”

But once we get to the resolution, there’s an aspect of it that recontextualizes the journey somewhat, and it makes a huge difference on a thematic level. It’s not just about seeking out the new and mysterious, but the need for human contact, for learning and experiencing people, and the film delivers that message in a surprising and heartfelt way that almost got me misty-eyed. It’s the idea that we’re not alone, whatever our personal paths may be, and that gives the proceedings just a hint of essentialism.

I guess I should be happy that this wasn’t a disaster, because so much of Disney’s massive corporate output so far this decade has been, and in the end, I did enjoy Moana 2. But it is derivative, and at times it’s cheap and almost insultingly lazy, because it was conceived as filler content on a streamer rather than being an actual follow-up to one of the animation studio’s last real masterworks. I’m glad that once the new course was set behind the scenes, something of quality could be salvaged, but at the same time, I can’t pretend that this is as good as its box office suggests (it’s already beaten the original by over $100 million domestically). If the last eight years have taught us anything, it should be that the existence of more money does not mean something or someone is better. It’s good enough, but that’s a distinction I typically reserve for the likes of Despicable Me 4 when it manages to make something passable after a decade of crap. The characters and the world established in the first Moana deserve much more than that.

Grade: B-

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Did you like this movie more or less than the first one? Is there any context where the nickname “Boat Snack” isn’t creepy as hell? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on December 23, 2024.

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William J Hammon
William J Hammon

Written by William J Hammon

All content is from the blog, “I Actually Paid to See This,” available at actuallypaid.com

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