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

The Moana follow-up is a “hurtling Disneyland rollercoaster 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 reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it’s ranked at sixth place in a list of all 73 of the studio’s feature-length animated cinema releases, whereas last year’s offering, Wish, is way down at number 65.

One reason why Moana garnered so many rave reviews is its refreshing originality. Rather than being adapted from a European fairy tale, it’s a joyous tribute to Polynesian mythology, and so, in Disney terms, it’s exploring uncharted territory. It also boasts sparklingly bright and colourful animation, a thrilling story, ingenious songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and two of Disney’s most beloved characters: Moana herself (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho), the bold but uncertain daughter of an island chief, and Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson), a braggart demigod with tattoos that move around his wardrobe-sized body.

It is, then, a hard act to follow. Making a worthwhile Moana sequel might not have been as impossible as matching Paddington 2, but it was always going to be tough. On the other hand, the first film ends with Moana leading her people out to sea to be the wayfarers that their ancestors were, so there is a logic to making a sequel about their travels. The premise is that Moana has been taking solo trips since we last saw her, but she is yet to meet anyone else. Then she hears about an island named Motofetu, which was a meeting place for civilisations from all over the ocean before it was cursed by a spiteful god. If Moana can find Motofetu, she might be able to make new friends and trading partners. (She might also reduce the risk of inbreeding, which is surely a severe, if unspoken threat to her tribe.) Needless to say, that means that 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 isn’t as urgent, and the songs rarely say anything important about the characters or the situation. More often than not, it seems, they’re inserted into the film simply because you can’t have a musical without a musical number every 10 minutes or so. Numerous crewmembers from the first film are back, but Moana 2 has new directors (David Derrick Jr, Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller) and new songwriters, TikTok sensations Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear. Their songs have the familiar Moana sound, but they’re nowhere near 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 cinema singing his songs rather than the new ones, which is not a great 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 television series, and it wasn’t until this February that Disney’s CEO announced that it was being reworked as a feature film. The project’s small-screen origins could explain why, to me, the characters look smoother and waxier than they did in 2016, as if they were action figures. The television 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 wear coconut shells as armour and who look as if they’ve abseiled in from Mad Max: Fury Road. You can see how useful these supporting characters might have been over the course of a series, but none one of them has quite enough to do in a film, and some of them don’t belong at all: if you were setting off a long and perilous marine voyage, why would you find room on your small wooden boat for an aged vegetable farmer and a pig?

And then there’s the structure. The plot does hang together as a complete, action-packed narrative, but it still comes across as several episodes glued together, each one more outlandish than the last. I think a magical trans-dimensional portal is involved, but between all of the different gods, ghosts, spirits and humongous fish monsters that Moana encounters, I have to confess that I wasn’t wholly sure what was going on. In a film that lacks the focus of its predecessor, what is especially puzzling is that we are barely shown the main villain: all we see are the bolts of lightning he throws at Moana and Maui. But then, in a bonus scene during the end credits, he turns up at last, vowing to take his revenge on Moana alongside a couple of other supernatural villains. Is this the first time that an animated Disney 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.

Despite all this Moana moaning, though, it’s still a high-quality piece of work: a hurtling Disneyland rollercoaster ride that small children, especially, are bound to enjoy. The irony is that if it had been a television series, viewers might well have gushed about how spectacular it was. But as a film, Moana 2 wouldn’t be near the top of any list of Disney’s finest.

Moana 2 is released in cinemas on 27 November in the US, and 29 November in the UK