Moana has always had it pretty good, as far as Disney princesses go. No one’s trying to marry her off against her will or keep her confined to a castle. She instead has spent her life preparing to inherit a leadership role on her island home of Motunui, where everyone seems to love her as much as her parents do. And when she’s torn between taking charge of her people and pursuing her calling of becoming a wayfinder and restoring their lost tradition of ocean voyaging, well, it turns out she can just do both! Even the villain she faces in the 2016 film, the lava monster Te Kā, isn’t a foe to be vanquished but a wounded goddess needed to be seen for what she truly is and healed. Moana wasn’t exactly long on conflict, but that finale, in which Moana gives the living island of Te Fiti back her heart, was lovely enough that it didn’t really matter, and the songs, which Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote with Opetaia Foa’i and Mark Mancina, were good, sometimes even great. Moana 2, on the other hand, has a soundtrack composed by the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, and it’s so devoid of bangers or any remotely memorable tunes that there’s nothing to distract you from the movie’s lack of clear stakes, or meaningful drama, or antagonists with any personality.
Seriously, what’s a girl got to do to get some good old-fashioned conflict around here? This is something of a recent Disney Animation issue. After a long, fraught history of villains that were more exciting, more colorful, and invariably more queer-coded than the heroes, the entertainment giant has in recent years banked away from having clear-cut bad guys at all, opting instead for its characters to face down systemic problems, their own insecurities, or adversaries who are really just misunderstood. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this squishier approach to creating tension, but in the case of Moana 2, which was directed by David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, the result is just boring. Whenever Moana, voiced once again by Auliʻi Cravalho, encounters an obstacle, whoever’s in her way turns out to be an ally in waiting, placated with an inspirational song, or both. The film is a series of stops in which this pattern repeats until we get to the end, when there’s an actual baddie, a storm god named Nalo who’s hidden away the key navigational island of Motufetū to keep the various Pacific Island communities apart for reasons all his own. It’d be great to hear them, but until a mid-credits scene, Nalo is literally just a bunch of baleful clouds and purple lightning.
Moana 2 started off as a Disney+ series, until the powers that be realized that trading enormous box-office returns for theoretical streaming growth was ridiculous and reworked the project into a theatrical release. You can still spot traces of those beginnings in its structure, which is part of why it feels so awkward. It would probably make more sense for the sultry bat-woman Matangi (Awhimai Fraser) to go from keeping demi-god Maui (Dwayne Johnson) prisoner to helping Moana out if it happened over the course of an episode. Instead, it happens over a song, leaving that character’s whole deal deeply confusing. A lot of things are confusing and maybe would be less so if they were developments that once had longer ramp-ups. It is, for instance, never really clear why, after a song establishing that the island of Motunui is thriving and growing, that it then becomes very pressing for Moana to reconnect the community to others out there, lest it face extinction. But off she goes, with animal sidekicks Heihei the rooster and Pua the pig, as well as a new human crew that includes shipbuilding Loto (Rose Matafeo), farmer Kele (David Fane), and folklorist and Maui fanboy Moni (Hualālai Chung).
Moana 2 looks pretty, at least, with the azure-blue waterscapes of the anthropomorphized ocean stretching out to the horizon. But it doesn’t feel like a true sequel so much as it feels like a souped-up version of one of the direct-to-video affairs that Disney used to pump out for all of its big releases. Cravalho may be back, and the Rock may be back, and while the David Bowie–esque coconut crab isn’t back, there is a giant non-singing clam with lots of eyes and tentacles that the characters have to navigate their way through. But the whole enterprise has an also-ran feel to it, like it’s just going through the motions, running through the same beats with slightly different and, in the case of the wretched Rock song that involves a chorus of “Come on-a / Moana,” decidedly weaker material. It won’t matter — Moana 2 is shaping up to be a sizable hit, because, wonder of wonders, it turns out that people like taking their kids to the movies. A real movie would give its protagonist something to continue to wrestle with as she learns and grows, but Moana 2 isn’t a real movie. It’s an extension of time-tested IP, a savvy play from a media giant that may struggle mightily when it comes to new original material but has always known how to continue capitalizing on its hits.
