Directors – David G. Derrick Jr, Jason Hand & Dana Ledoux Miller, Screenplay – Jared Bush & Dana Ledoux Miller, Story – Jared Bush, Dana Ledoux Miller & Bek Smith, Producers – Christina Chen & Yvett Merino, Music – Mark Mancina, Songs – Abigail Barlow, Emily Bear, Opetaia Foa’I & Mark Mancina, Animation Director – Byron Howard, Visual Effects Supervisors – Carlos Cabral & Kyle Odermatt, Production Design – Ian Gooding. Production Company – Disney.
Voices
Auli’i Cravalho (Moana), Dwayne Johnson (Maui), Hualalai Chung (Moni), Rose Matafeo (Loto), David Fane (Kele), Awhimai Fraser (Matangi), Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda (Simea), Temuera Morrison (Chief Tui), Nicole Sherzinger (Sina), Rachel House (Gramma Tala)
Plot
Moana is on a quest, searching for more of her people. She receives a vision that she needs to find the way to the island of Motefetu otherwise her people are doomed to die out. To search for the island, Moana assembles a crew of islanders and sets out on a bigger canoe to follow the trail of a comet in the sky. Meanwhile, Maui has been imprisoned by the demigoddess Matangi. Moana must help Maui escape Matangi’s clutches so that they can enter the storm Nalo and raise an island that will reunite the peoples.
Moana (2016) was one of the biggest animated hits that Disney had in the 2010s, earning some $640 million worldwide. Moana 2 is a sequel. It had originally been conceived as a five-episode mini-series for the Disney+ streaming channel circa 2020 but was decided to rework the results for the big screen. At the same time, it has also been announced that there will be a live-action Moana (2026) with Dwayne Johnson reprising the role of Maui.
Moana 2 offers fairly much more of the same as before. It reunites the principal characters and voice actors from the previous film and gives them another quest storyline. One of the notable absences is John Musker and Ron Clements, the co-directors of the original, veteran Disney animators who were responsible for The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992) and Hercules (1997), and their replacement by three newcomer directors none of whom had handled a full-length film before. On the positive side, what that gives us a film that less overrun by Musker and Clements’ characteristically grating pop culture asides and bubble-popping one-liners.
The exact same criticisms I made of Moana still stand when it comes to Moana 2. That is that for all it celebrates Pacific Island culture, it is less a piece of cultural identity than it is a piece of marketing product from a major US entertainment distributor that is exploiting a cultural/ethnic niche. The key thing is that while Disney may bow to the inclusion of Polynesian culture in the use of voice actors, designs and elements of myth, the film is directed, written, produced by American talent, not Pacific Island peoples.
Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) and Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) back for more
Disney of the 2010s onwards has been an increasingly formula driven studio where their output is focused on IP, which means having one hit and endlessly extruding it in sequels, or else recycling past hits in a series of desultory live-action remakes. This is one of the reasons that I am longer as enthused about Animation as I used to be – most theatrical releases now simply consist of extruded IP that cycles familiar characters through minimal variations on the same plot. Although for Disney, this was a practice that goes back to the early 2000s where they made a series of cheaply animated video-released sequels to their animated classics. Moana 2 is essentially another of these direct-to-video sequels that has been given a bigger budget and theatrical release.
Moana 2 is not quite as formulaic and lifeless as Frozen II (2019), the nadir of the recycled Disney animation product, but it is getting close. Everything is formula. This involves a heroine who goes well beyond the strong, plucky heroines Disney favoured in the past and is so hyper-competent and awesome that even the ocean is her friend. There is a quest for reasons reasons to combat an evil storm that involves Maui having to fish an island up from the depths (in differing versions of the legends of Maui, the islands are said to be either Hawaii or the north island of New Zealand). There is an evil witch imprisoning Maui for reasons reasons. There are songs that go on and on.
All of this involves a good deal of technically polished CGI animation and fighting with flashing lights that signify absolutely nothing. The stakes in the film feel so artificially created – evil storm thing, the fate of the people – and without anything in the way that can’t be overcome with Moana being awesome, everyone else being positive and Maui being glib and flippant that you have zero care about the outcome.
