‘Moana 2’ has splashy visuals but lacks the heart of the original

The following is a transcript of Jon’s podcast review of Moana 2:

Welcome to Cinemaholics. I’m Jon Negroni, and I’ve just seen Moana 2. Now, this isn’t going to be an instant take review right out of the theater, mainly because I am recording this the next day. So, this is going to be a little bit different. But I did want to put something out there before the movie comes out. It is Thanksgiving week, so I know a lot of you are maybe having some busier weeks, finding some time with family and everything, and maybe you are considering going to see Moana 2 in the theater. And if that’s the case, you might be curious—what is the movie all about? Is it worth checking out and all of that?

So this is going to be a little bit of a different thing. Will Ashton hasn’t seen the movie yet, so we’re not doing a podcast review of it together, at least not right now. So I’m going to walk you through what I think of the film, of course, keeping it as spoiler-free as I can. So really not revealing things beyond the trailer, although there’s not too much with this movie that would feel, I think, all that spoilery besides the most obvious stuff, I suppose.

The first Moana was a huge success.

Now, one thing that you should probably know about Moana 2 is that the first Moana is such a whirlwind success story for Disney, I think in a way that not a lot of people saw coming. I remember watching that film in 2016, and I didn’t have the highest expectations for it. I think I went into it hoping it would be good and, you know, having a good sense of like, all right, you know, it’s Disney Animation. They’d been making some good stuff here and there. You know, they had made Wreck-It Ralph, which was one of my favorites in the last few years around that time. I enjoyed the first Frozen. I’m sure, like a lot of other people, you know, I was definitely getting sick of Frozen by that point in 2016, but, you know, I could still appreciate the film itself.

And of course, Tangled. Tangled was just such a big success, and it was showing that Disney was finding ways to take this CG 3D art style and kind of make it their own, kind of work with these character models with like the bigger eyes. It’s now sort of a thing that’s baked into Disney Animation, their house style, when you see a movie like Frozen, Tangled, Moana, and some of the more recent stuff like Raya and the Last Dragon and Strange World. A lot of the character designs are becoming pretty samey, and it’s kind of lending itself to, all right, this is the new—like the 2D art style kind of had its own thing going on.

And there was a lot of connective tissue between the movies like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and all that. But at the same time, I do kind of miss when those Disney movies were still very distinct from each other, right? Especially the Disney Renaissance. And this is a bit of a tangent. I won’t go too far off. But even comparing a movie between Beauty and the Beast and Mulan and Tarzan and Pocahontas, like those movies didn’t look identical. They really did have a lot of different, you know, distinctions and everything.

And that’s not to say Moana 2 and Tangled necessarily look identical. They do have their own quirks, but I don’t know. I’m feeling a little bit like, I wish these movies just were slightly, you know, more of their own kind or whatever. But yeah, that’s neither here nor there.

From Disney+ to theatrical release…

So we have Moana 2 coming out. Gosh, it’s been eight years. That time has flown by. And as I was kind of alluding to before, I really enjoyed that first Moana film. I thought it was really well done. One of the main reasons was because I thought that they just really nailed the music. They had Lin-Manuel Miranda come in for a lot of the songwriting, and he’s not back for the sequel, by the way, in case you’re curious. And I’ll get into why that is in a minute.

But the music was just—it was very different for a Disney film. It was just purely catchy. It just hit all the right notes. I think it solved a lot of the problems that I was facing, or that I had with Frozen. Frozen had a couple of good songs, but I felt like it was just sort of missing a lot of triumphant music in sort of key points. Like, it really rests its hat on “Let It Go.” And obviously, “Let It Go” was like a huge banger, and everybody loved it at the time. And “Love Is an Open Door” was very good and very catchy. That’s probably my favorite. “Do You Want To Build a Snowman” was, you know, very heart-wrenching, and “For the First Time in Forever” was good.

But then there was like one other song, and then the movie just kind of forgets that it’s a musical for the rest. And that was my big criticism with Frozen. Moana just felt like a more well-rounded musical. You know, it didn’t have like the high highs of Frozen, but I think that overall, I much appreciate that soundtrack better. It has a really good orchestral beginning to it, really unique to the Pacific Islander kind of aesthetic.

The music is no comparison.

And, in my opinion, I think “You’re Welcome” is just such a fun song—much more fun to me than, you know, for example, the Olaf snowman song or whatever. And I think “How Far I’ll Go” and the way that that’s reprised later in the film is just—it’s just really well done. It’s not “Let It Go” in terms, again, but still, I just appreciate everything like as a whole. And I think a lot of people ended up liking “Shiny.” You know, I think that was one of those songs that kind of snuck up on people.

But anyway, beyond the music, the first one was just a good time. It was a well-done movie. Good writing—not the best writing in the world or anything—but I really appreciated how it handled its main character. She didn’t have all these random superpowers. It wasn’t trying to go too hard with her role in everything. It was subversive, but it wasn’t trying to be subversive for the sake of it. It was just very well done. It was the same folks who had made The Little Mermaid and a bunch of other Disney stuff over the years. The Princess and the Frog, I think, was Clemens and Musker’s last thing.

Now we have Moana 2, and I think one of the main reasons we’re getting Moana 2—and people might be wondering, well, we got Frozen 2, we got Ralph Breaks the Internet, so it makes sense we’re getting a Moana 2, but why didn’t we get Tangled 2 or anything like that? And I think one of the reasons, maybe, is that, first of all, they were planning on this being a TV show. They were going to make a Moana series, and this was going to be, I think, one of those things that would start off as like an animated movie that would kick off the show.

So that’s something that Disney’s been doing ever since Aladdin and the Return of Jafar. So Return of Jafar really was just like an extended pilot episode to the Aladdin series. And in a similar way, Moana 2 is kind of doing that. But it’s funny, I actually was in Disneyland a week or so ago, and I went to the Animation Academy thing with my wife, and we actually drew one of the new characters from the movie—one of the Kakamora.

And while we were drawing the character, the animator who was guiding us through it actually told us a lot of this information. And one of the things he mentioned was that he said they had been working on the show, and they realized—or they decided—Disney did, that this movie was more than Disney+. Like, they were just going to put it on Disney+, but they figured, you know, honestly, this should just be a movie. It has the juice to be a theatrical film.

Now, the more cynical side of me would look at that and say, personally, I think the decision probably came a little bit more from folks being kind of—I think the folks at Disney, I should say—being weary of how Disney+ hasn’t totally worked out financially. And it has been feeling like they’ve been dumping all of this money into the streaming service on these movies and shows and everything, but it hasn’t been generating a lot of return—nowhere near, of course, the same that a theatrical movie will, right?

A theatrical movie is going to make them hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re still doing a lot of expenses with marketing and everything even if they’re putting something on Disney+. So I do think that Disney was already kind of moving away from Disney+ being a prime vehicle for releases and instead being treated as kind of just like a Disney Channel kind of thing that has a lot of stuff and then maybe they rotate in and out—which probably should have been their business model at the beginning, but that’s a conversation for another podcast.

But no, I think that they rightfully—and I agree with this decision—decided let’s make Moana 2 and let’s just make it a movie. Put the real effort in, make it beautifully animated, give it the cinematic flair you would expect from a big box office movie, release it around Thanksgiving—or in this case, right at Thanksgiving—and make money.

It’s going to be the thing that belies more success for Disney because when they make money off these artistic endeavors, it makes it so that we don’t just have a slew of sequels all the time when they’re just dumping things on a streaming service. And then when they don’t get their money back, they have to shortchange a bunch of other projects that are more original. So again, another podcast for another day—it has to do more with Pixar, but we don’t have to talk about Pixar today.

But anyway, so all that preamble aside, that’s why when you watch Moana 2 it may seem a little uncanny. It may seem like there are some things kind of missing from that first movie. We do have different directors here: David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller. Miller—I almost forgot their last name. And this is their first film. This is their feature directorial debuts.

The new creative team behind Moana 2.

The screenplay here, though, Dana Ledoux Miller did the screenplay with Jared Bush. Yeah, even like down to the producers, this feels like a totally different creative team handling the movie. We do have a lot of the returning voices, reprising voices coming back. Auliʻi Cravalho comes back as Moana.

After Moana, she had a bit of a—she started making stuff. She was very young with that first Moana film. Amazing singing voice for her age, too. I think she was just—she was a teenager. Now she’s a bit more established. She’s been doing some smaller films, but also she’s done a lot of TV stuff since then. And so it makes a lot of sense to bring her back. She still has the pipes. She’s a great singer.

Dwayne Johnson, of course, comes back as Maui, but he has a bit of a smaller role in this film, and I think in a way that pretty much works. And then you have Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger, Rachel House, and Alan Tudyk. So it’s a lot of the, in terms of the top billing, we don’t have this kind of splashy, like, “We have this big villain voiced by this amazing voice actor who’s going to do all this stuff.” That’s kind of where it feels like, yeah, this is more of like a TV show kind of budget. Like, we’re not trying to do this splashy, “We have seven recognizable voice actors you know from shows and movies and things.” Like, Keegan-Michael Key isn’t in this and all, you know what I mean?

So no, it’s a bit more well-rounded, I guess, in terms of the voice cast being a bit humble. And the movie takes place three years after the first film. They actually—I don’t even think they specified the three years. I just got that from the press notes, so I’m just assuming the press notes are right. I honestly thought it was more than three years. It felt like more, but not that much has changed for Moana herself.

Moana’s arc in Moana 2 misses something crucial.

I guess I shouldn’t say that. A lot has changed in the sense that she has really become the de facto chief of her village. Like, she’s not the official chief; her dad is still in charge. But she’s sort of like the Jesus Christ of her village. Everybody loves and worships her. She has a little sister now who has been born in the intervening years, and she’s super precocious. She and Moana love each other and everything. The beginning of this movie is very lovey-dovey. It’s very happy. It’s very like, everything’s going great for Moana, basically.

Which was kind of one of the first things that I was starting to struggle with in the movie. I was a little bit like, yeah, you know, it seems kind of strange to me that like, what is Moana trying to do in this movie? Like, what is her character arc this time around? Because the first one, it was very clear. Like, she wanted to leave the island. She wanted to, you know, rediscover her ancestry, even though it was an act of rebellion.

But now everyone kind of respects her, and she doesn’t really have any glaring character flaws at the beginning of this movie. She doesn’t have any self-doubts. She’s just kind of perfect. It’s very strange. And it’s not even that bad, I guess. I just was waiting for the shoe to drop. Like, all right, what does Moana need to learn? Because I really like this character. I think she’s really well-written in that first movie.

Here, I just feel like she’s at the height of her powers. Powers not being literal, but like, what is the thing that she needs to get? And then the movie just kind of drops the plot, and it’s all external. It’s all external conflict. This thing is happening to her, and her agency is kind of not really controlled by her. It’s like, “Moana, you gotta go do this thing. You gotta go chase the thing, and only you can do it, Moana.” And it’s just kind of basic. It’s kind of generic.

And I’m like, that is not what the charm of the first movie was. The charm of the first movie was she was an underdog. You did not expect her to be able to do this amazing thing. Even when she gets in contact with Maui in the first movie and they do this thing together, she doesn’t have any powers. She’s not a great voyager yet. She’s just trying to make this stuff up as she goes along. But it’s her pluck, it’s her persistence, and it’s her clever thinking that helps her and the way that she’s able to forge this friendship with Maui that makes her so compelling.

And they kind of try to do the same thing with Encanto years later. And I think that’s why that movie kind of works as well as it does because Mirabel is more interesting because of the things that she can’t do. Now, in this movie, Moana is more competent, and that’s fun to see. It’s fun to see her be like, she’s really good at this. I’m like, all right, cool. You have that skill, but what is the cost?

What is the thing that, you know, she is starting to deal with? Like, what are her new character pains? What are the things that she needs to learn in the movie? And the movie kind of throws some haphazard things in it. This time, she has a crew. This time, she can’t rely on Maui as much. Okay. But there are never moments where that self-doubt feels at all earned. It’s just kind of like, I don’t know. At random points, maybe she has a bit of a crisis of conscience, I guess. But I don’t know. It’s very weak writing, and I don’t know what it is exactly that they could have done, but it was bumming me out, honestly.

I was kind of like, man, you know, this really isn’t hitting those same highs, and the music isn’t quite at the same level. It’s nowhere near the same level. I mean, I’m sorry. There are one or two songs that are fun to listen to, a little bit head-bopping, and they have nice refrains, but this is not the first Moana in terms of the soundtrack. That first Moana—I could listen to that soundtrack over and over again. This one? I like one or two songs fine.

The new songwriters here are Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear. And, you know, I’m fine with some new talent coming in. It doesn’t have to be Lin-Manuel Miranda. But one of the reasons he wasn’t brought on for this again is because they thought this was going to be a show—you know, budget and all of that. And I don’t really think that the big issue is the songwriting necessarily. I think a lot of it is just the story around this music is so weak and kind of, like I said, basic and generic.

Expanding the lore.

Like, we’ve got to go to this thing and connect these things. They bring up a lot of stuff that’s interesting. They bring up, like, okay, Maui is a demi-god, so that means that there are other demi-gods, there are other gods. That’s a great way to expand the world of the movie. And one thing that the movie does get right that’s very helpful, actually, is it starts to flesh out the lore a bit more.

The first movie—there were some lore inconsistencies that kind of bugged me. There was this stuff around how Maui’s like a thousand years old, and it was a little confusing how long the islands had been around and who Maui was in the context of everything. This movie answers a lot of those questions in a way that makes sense, that actually kind of fixes the first movie in some respects. So I’ll give the movie a lot of credit for that.

But yeah, we get to our final act and everything. I think it nails the landing, which is great. I think that it’s one of the reasons why I ultimately walk away from this movie being like, it’s okay. It’s not a huge bummer for me, and fortunately, I didn’t have the biggest expectations in the world. But I do think the ending kind of lands on an interesting note again because it feels like a setup for a show.

And it does do some things where I’m like, all right, you know, I think this movie feels like a transition. And, you know, I genuinely think that they should just do another movie. It feels like they might do a movie instead, but it feels like they are setting up a Moana 3 that, again, could be more interesting, that could take Moana somewhere, like give her a real character arc this time.

Not just like, all right, we have Moana, she’s awesome. Let’s throw a bunch of problems at her and watch her solve them. Like, it’s just not that exciting of a premise, honestly. But there are some things that this movie sets up that could be really cool and well done. I do like some of the little details around this movie, you know. Like, this time Pua comes along for the ride. I was happy to see that. I like Pua and Hei Hei.

And Moana has more of a crew, right? She has to be more of a leader. Again, why didn’t the movie kind of lean on that? Like, the movie should have started with her being like, she just wants to go it alone. She doesn’t want to work with anybody, but there isn’t that. She’s just kind of like, I guess I’ll have a crew, whatever. Like, she just shakes it off. And there was no sort of resistance to it.

And I was wanting to see that. And I think her having a crew is a great complication from the first movie. This time she has other people from the village, other people she’s responsible for. That’s something she didn’t have to deal with in the first movie. It didn’t all come down to her.

In Moana 2, it just hints at it. Like it had little baby hints, like maybe that’s something that’s bugging her. There’s like one moment that happens, but it’s not set up really well. So then the payoff just kind of feels kind of like, you know—and there’s no real tension here, honestly. Like, you just kind of, as you’re watching this movie, you’re waiting for everything to be fine. Like, I never was feeling like, they didn’t got this.

A safe but serviceable sequel.

So yeah, that was something that I just wish the movie could have been a little bit better at. But again, it’s an expectations thing. If you go into it feeling like, all right, you—it’s not going to be the first Moana. I think we all had a feeling that was going to be the case. There wasn’t a ton of hype for this movie, you know, in the months leading up. I think that watching it, I can see why.

I think that it’s serviceable. It’s functional. It’s kind of an easy movie to recommend to people who liked the first movie. But of course, under that, like, okay, it’s more of the first, but it’s—yeah.

You’re not going to quite have the same emotional experience that you got from that first one. I don’t know what emotion I was supposed to get a lot of the time, you know. A lot of this movie, like, it’s going for the comedy. It’s going for some slapstick stuff again, and it succeeds here and there.

It succeeds here and there. I think one of the issues is that it’s too frantic at times. Like, characters are talking and moving so fast, and it’s so wacky that you can never let things just sit. You know, we’re so far away from the days of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where a whole scene can just kind of settle and really feel the gravitas of something. We don’t have that anymore.

The thing that kind of bugs me is it’s so hyperactive. I think it’s trying to serve the younger minds of this generation, not my generation, right? To which they need it to be kind of like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And that’s something that, I guess, I can’t totally criticize. I can’t say that Disney is wrong for leaning into that sort of thing because they’re trying to do this in a way that is for that kind of younger, attention-starved generation.

But look, that’s more of a treatise on society, I guess. It’s a chicken-or-egg sort of thing. Is it Disney that’s causing this in the first place by making entertainment that doesn’t force people to just kind of relax and have some patience? Is Disney part of the problem? Again, I’m setting up a bunch of podcasts I don’t have time to unpack. So we’ll leave it there, I guess.

Moana 2 is going to be out in theaters on November 27th. So it’s going to be, I think, a lot of people will be able to watch it the night that I’m recording this in preview screenings, although I’m not 100% sure about that. A great one to bring the kids, you know, and I—at my screening, there were some kids there, and they seemed to be having a good time.

Even though the movie didn’t quite work for me, I do think that it’s going to—it’s one of those movies that’s going to be like Frozen 2, where the kids are going to be like, yay. They’re going to be super excited, right? Like the people who watched the Star Wars movies and just kind of tricked themselves into liking them—the sequels and the prequels and stuff—and then later on, they’ll be like, hey, you know, those movies weren’t that great, huh?

But I think that this is going to be a similar kind of situation where, yeah, we made a sequel. It’s not going to be the sequel that redefines the first or anything. In this case, I think Disney played it a little bit safe. And maybe that was the decision from the get-go, right?

And so it’s tough. I always respect the attempt, you know, when they want to really go for it. I think Ralph Breaks the Internet was kind of like that. It’s like, we really want this movie to rise above the first one. Like, we’re going to break the rules and everything.

And even then, I didn’t love Ralph Breaks the Internet, so—but I could respect it. I could look at it and be like, at least you tried, you know, and you gave it your all there. Anyway, that is my quick kind of solo review of Moana 2. Didn’t mean to rhyme there, but yeah, check it out if you’re interested. But yeah, hopefully, you don’t have the highest expectations because you might be set up for some big disappointment.

All right, we’ll see you all next time on whatever we’re doing for the main show, or if we have any instant takes coming up. Until then, take it easy and have a great holiday. Have a great Thanksgiving if you’re celebrating.

The bottom line.

Moana 2 expands on the original’s lore with stunning animation and some fun moments, but it falls short on the overall music and character journey. While it’s a safe, family-friendly sequel, it lacks the magic that made the first film unforgettable.

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