‘Moana 2’ Is Rough Sailing Through Shallow Waters
Disney’s latest animated feature ditches the heart of the original for a rushed follow-up story.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Disney’s first feature-length animated movie. If you go from that film’s release in 1937 all the way to 2016, there were only two animated sequels in that time span: The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Fantasia 2000 (guess what year that came out). Since 2016, Disney has cranked out three sequels in eight years: Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), Frozen II (2019), and now Moana 2. Although sequels aren’t inherently bad, Disney’s heavy reliance on them as brand extensions means that story isn’t as important as knowing they can lure in viewers due to familiarity. But what looks like a safe bet becomes risky when a studio pushes for a sequel regardless of whether there’s a story to support the new installment, and that’s what’s happened with Moana 2.
The first Moana is prime Disney. The directors are studio stalwarts John Musker and Ron Clements (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Princess and the Frog). The musical numbers hail from Lin-Manuel Miranda (alongside Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i) fresh off his massive hit Hamilton. The filmmakers seriously invested in telling a story rooted in Polynesian mythology with a cultural sensitivity that had been missing in earlier Disney movies. Despite some minor qualms I have with Moana, I can’t deny that it’s a labor of love on the part of the people who made it, and that emotional energy carries through in seeing the journey and transformation of Moana (Auli’I Cravalho) and traveling companion/demi-god Maui (Dwayne Johnson).
Moana 2 is rush job from a desperate studio reeling from their last two animated features (Wish and Strange World) failing to make waves at the box office during the Thanksgiving season. What you need to know going into Moana 2 is that it was originally planned as a series for Disney+. Then in February of this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that the show was being reworked into a feature set for release this November. This meant that while they were able to get the lead voice talent back, Moana 2 would be without Musker, Clements, and Miranda—three key creatives behind the first film’s success. Furthermore, the directors trying to handle the transition from a show to a movie—David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller—had less than a year to accomplish this daunting task.
When you know this, the problems with Moana 2 make a lot more sense. The story about Moana seeking to unite other tribes probably carried over from the series, but now it’s all condensed into Moana needing to find a special island, conscripting a crew of three fellow islanders from her home of Motunui, and then reteaming with Maui to defeat a thunder god that wants to keep the tribes apart for some undefined reason. You can tell from the jump that there’s a problem because Moana ends with leading her tribe off the island to be explorers, but now the movie picks up to where Moana is still the only real traveler and the film’s burdens fall to her.
The narrative shortcuts may stitch the plot together, but they drain the film of any emotional impact. In the first movie, Moana’s conflict is between wanting to remain loyal to her village and her yearning to explore the ocean. That inner conflict is almost completely absent in Moana 2. Moana may have a few doubts with the burden of her responsibility and when she’ll return to her family, but the quest is imparted to her by an ancestor. She’s called to unite the tribes, but the stakes are never clear about what would happen should she fail as opposed to the first movie, where failure to restore the heart of Te Fiti meant blight and death for the island.
This sets Moana on a quest where, rather than finding her own way, she largely does what she’s told. An ancestor tells her where to go and episodic encounters on the sea direct Moana to the next step in her journey. Even the reunification of Moana and Maui feels awkward as he’s captured and sidelined until Moana happens to cross paths with him, and then it turns out his captor was only holding him until Moana arrived even though there was no way of knowing that would happen. These kinds of conveniences pile up and grease the plot but at the expense of any stakes. Everything keeps working out because we need to get to the next plot beat.
The mechanical nature of the storytelling spills over into every element of the film’s design. There’s no creative spark here, and it never feels like they’re trying to top the first movie as much as simply get a Moana sequel into theaters. This means that while composers Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i, who collaborated with Miranda on the first film, return alongside newcomers Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, they can’t craft the catchy hooks that Miranda gives his music. Not only that, but there aren’t any distinct visuals to marry to the music outside Maui’s new song, “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” Nothing in this movie comes close to the catchiness and creativity of “You’re Welcome” or the rousing, “How Far I’ll Go.”
While Moana 2 may not be as terribly misguided as last year’s Wish, it’s still a poor excuse for a sequel and a Disney animated feature. We get new characters to accompany Moana, but they’re one-dimensional and fail to illuminate anything new about Moana and Maui. The film is at its best when it’s about how much Maui cares about Moana, but it takes almost half the movie to reunite the characters. Watching Moana 2, we’re reminded of how the first movie breezed along, and how it’s an exemplar of what viewers expect from an animation studio as celebrated as Disney’s. By comparison, the sequel constantly struggles to stay afloat and hopes audiences won’t notice that this new vessel is barely seaworthy.
Matt Goldberg is a film critic living in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter,
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Thanks for the analysis, Matt. I had a feeling this was going to be the case so I've been hesitant to see it—unfortunately you confirmed most of my suspicions.