‘Solid’ but Moana is ‘a tough act to follow’

The Moana follow-up is a “speeding Disneyland roller coaster ride,” but it lacks the joy and refreshing originality of its predecessor.

Moana is one of the best cartoons in Disney history – and you don’t have to take my word for it. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it is ranked sixth on a list of all 73 of the studio’s long animated theatrical releases, while last year’s offering, Wish, is way down at number 65.

One reason Moana garnered so many rave reviews is its refreshing originality. Rather than being adapted from a European fairy tale, it’s a joyous homage to Polynesian mythology and so, in Disney terms, explores uncharted territory. It also boasts sparkling lights and colorful animation, a thrilling story, brilliant songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and two of Disney’s most beloved characters: Moana herself (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho), the bold but insecure daughter of an island -chief, and Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson), a swaggering demigod with tattoos who moves around in his closet-sized space.

It is therefore a difficult act to follow. Making a worthwhile Moana sequel might not have been so impossible as matching Paddington 2but it would always be hard. On the other hand, the first movie ends with Moana leading her people out to sea to be the wayfarers their ancestors were, so making a sequel about their travels makes sense. The premise is that Moana has been taking solo trips since we last saw her, but she has yet to meet anyone else. Then she hears about an island called Motofetu, which was a meeting place for civilizations from across the sea before it was cursed by a malevolent god. If Moana can find Motofetu, she might make new friends and trading partners. (She can also reduce the risk of inbreeding, which is surely a serious if unspoken threat to her tribe.) Naturally, this means she has to find Maui first.

It’s a solid set-up for a quest adventure, but it’s obvious early on that Moana 2 isn’t going to be as exciting or as revelatory as Moana was. The comedy is broader and sillier, the mission is less urgent, and the songs rarely say anything important about the characters or the situation. More often than not, they seem to be inserted into the film simply because you can’t have a musical without a musical number every 10 minutes or so. Several cast members from the first film return, but Moana 2 features new directors (David Derrick Jr, Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller) and new songwriters, TikTok sensations Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear. Their songs have that familiar Moana sound, but they aren’t nearly as catchy or as witty as How Far I’ll Go, Shiny, You’re Welcome or the others that Miranda wrote for the original film. At the screening I attended, people left the theater singing his songs instead of the new ones, which is not a good sign.

It’s hardly unusual for a sequel to fall short of the film before it, of course, but the specific ways in which Moana 2 falls short are symptomatic of how it was developed: it was conceived as a TV series, and it wasn’t until February that Disney’s CEO announced that it was reworked as a feature film. The small screen origins of the project could explain why the characters look to me more smooth and waxy than they did in 2016, like they were action figures. The TV script could also account for the introduction of Moana’s goofy gang of sidekicks, including a standard-issue oddball boffin (voiced by Rose Matafeo) and one of the goblins from the first film who wears coconut shells as armor and looks , as if they have abseiled in from Mad Max: Fury Road. You can see how useful these supporting characters could have been over the course of a series, but none of them have quite enough to do in a movie, and some of them don’t belong at all: if you were to embark on a long and perilous seafaring, why would you find room on your little wooden boat for an old vegetable farmer and a pig?

And then there is the structure. The plot holds together well as a complete, action-packed narrative, but it still comes across as several episodes glued together, each more outlandish than the last. I think there’s a magical trans-dimensional portal involved, but between all the various gods, ghosts, spirits, and huge fish monsters that Moana encounters, I have to admit, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. In a film that lacks the focus of its predecessor, what’s particularly confusing is that we barely get to see the main villain: all we see are the lightning bolts he throws at Moana and Maui. But then, in a bonus scene during the end credits, he finally shows up and vows to get revenge on Moana, along with a few other supernatural villains. Is this the first time a Disney animated film has borrowed the Marvel gimmick of using one sequel to set up another? It certainly undermines the sense that Moana 2 is any kind of special or unique event.

For all that Moana moaning, though, it’s still a high-quality piece of work: a fast-paced Disneyland roller coaster ride that young kids in particular will enjoy. The irony is that if it had been a TV series, viewers might have thought about how spectacular it was. But as a movie, Moana 2 wouldn’t be near the top of any list of Disney’s best.

Moana 2 opens in theaters on November 27 in the US and November 29 in the UK