Sequelitis strikes back
The first shot of Moana 2 focuses on a hermit crab switching to a new shell. The metaphor is clear: you're about to watch a story about leaving your comfort zone and searching for a bigger home. After our heroine taught her people to sail again in her first movie, she now has to solve the reason for their isolation: a storm god, afraid of the heights humans can reach with cooperation, has sunk an island that served as meeting point for all the navigation routes. (How there can be an unskippable crossroads in open sea isn't addressed.) One of Moana's ancestors, a legendary leader, already tried to find the lost island and failed. If the scattered sea peoples don't reconnect, they'll die out in a few generations. Moana needs to gather a crew and her demigod friend Maui to raise the sunken island before…
Before what? What, exactly, is the threat here?
This is one of the most noticeable problems with the writing of Moana 2: an adventure story needs a sense of looming danger, and the one presented here unfolds on a scale of centuries. Moana could relax, train more sailors, recruit a bigger crew, and, you know, travel directly to the other islands instead of looking for a vanished one where nobody lives anyway. This artificial urgency may be an effect of translating into cinema what originally was intended to be a full season of TV. The first Moana movie had ticking-time-bomb stakes and a straightforward structure. This one shoves a massive, epic conflict between gods and mortals within a tight, crowded space.
Another of the consequences of turning a TV series into a movie is the loss of development for the supporting cast. Moana and Maui are joined by a shipbuilding engineer, a craftsman who records stories in woven cloth, and an old farmer whose unique contribution to the team is promised but not delivered. Whatever arcs they were going to have are reduced to learning to work together. These character concepts deserved more depth than they get.
While the animation effort was well spent in designing breathtaking landscapes and cool monsters, imagination seems to have been in short supply when it came to drawing people. Either that, or the shift to movie format reduced the available time for artists to devote the necessary care to each scene's emotional delivery. This movie is rated for kids, but you could play a drinking game for every time Moana makes this exact face:
To be fair, the plot makes valuable points about the civilizational dangers of isolationism and the advantages of intercultural competence. The character who weaves cloth can point the team to an important subquest thanks to an ability to read pictorial narratives. Moana realizes she's on the right track toward finding the other sea peoples because she unearthes a piece of ancient ceramic, which in the context of Pacific Islander culture, where most objects for everyday use are crafted from perishable plant materials, is a huge deal.
However, these achievements in storytelling get lost in the rhythm of events. Probably as another result of the change in format, this movie is left with a very strange pacing. The pivotal downer that ends the second act doesn't get enough time to breathe before it's overshadowed by a tonally dissonant song. A fascinating secondary antagonist gets a great costume and a banger song, but the hidden complexities of this character end up swept under the rug. In the climax scene, Maui suffers a major calamity that is almost immediately reversed. Moana 2 speeds through its beats as if ticking off a checklist, and the excitement that ought to linger after our heroine's daring adventures wears off as quickly as every other emotional moment in the story.
To complete the perfect storm against this movie, there's a live-action Moana planned for 2026, a convergence of Disney's frantic remake spree accelerating to an unsustainable pace and The Rock's meticulously curated self-mythologizing campaign reaching critical fission mass. The timing is inauspicious: the mid-credits scene of Moana 2 is an obvious tease for a sequel that may or may not matter under the shadow of the remake. I bet it's going to be hard for Disney to properly care for both projects at the same time, and it's conceivably going to be harder to do for viewers. The impression left by Moana 2 is that the studio didn't have a solid idea of what to do with it, and instead of committing to a TV series that could overlap with the remake, preferred to release it in one go just to get it over with.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
