VERDICT: Shares most of the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor, although at this point, novelty has sailed off to the seven seas. Kids who know the first movie by heart will delight in a second helping.
In Moana and its sequel Moana 2, the lead character’s status as not-a-princess becomes an inside joke: Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) is the heroine of a Disney movie after all, so her status as a chieftain-to-be and not a crown-wearing cutie makes her stand out amidst her animated peers.
Apart from her title, and her regional specificity as a Pacific Islander, Moana doesn’t stray too far from the studio mold: Like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Moana wants to go places and do things outside of the proscribed world she knows; like Mulan, she’s willing to lay her life on the line for the good of her people.
(And as in those other films, viewers know this because she sings about it.) 2016’s Moana offered a whole new visual language of Disney animation, one of the lush tropical settings (without the colonial fetishization of, say, the Enchanted Tiki Room), Indigenous tattoos, and Polynesian myths.
With Moana 2, the novelty is gone — and so is composer Lin-Manuel Miranda; taking his place is a quartet of songwriters whose work here is pleasant but not immediately memorable. And so, for the most part, is Moana 2.
After saving the world in the previous movie, everything’s great for Moana and her island community of Motonui which has, in the intervening years, grown to include Moana’s devoted younger sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda). There’s even an opening number about how everything is exactly as it should be, and it’s always bad news when characters are that optimistic in the first ten minutes.
Sure enough, another crisis arises: There’s an island that was once the juncture point for the various communities who live by the sea, but a vengeful god hid it to prevent human beings from joining together and becoming too powerful. If Moana can’t carry out the wishes of the ancestors and find the island, Motonui is fated to stagnate and die from its isolation.
And so she embarks on another journey, and this time, she’s got more of a crew than Heihei the rooster (Alan Tudyk) and Pua the pig; joining her are grumpy farmer Kele (David Fane), boat-builder and strategic thinker Loto (Rose Matafeo), and storyteller Moni (Hualalai Chung), a ragtag bunch who, go figure, learn to work together and use their gifts for the common good. Eventually joining along is, of course, demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), who does a lot of vain preening when he’s not actively helping with the mission. (The fact that Moni is a dyed-in-the-sarong Maui fanboy becomes one of this sequel’s most effective running gags.)
Moana 2 is always a joy to look at, from its shimmering blue waters to its stunning seacraft to the engaging character design of the human characters, the animals, and even the sentient coconut pirates. (Yes, they’re back, too.) For all the kids who grew up on the first film over the last eight years, there are plenty of callbacks and repeated gags alongside the new characters and new creatures (notably, a clam the size of a skyscraper with a fondness for crushing boats).
But this remains firmly the kind of sequel aimed solely at people who want to watch the same movie again, only with a number in the title. Moana was about its heroine going to a place and getting a thing and learning to believe in herself; this time, we see a fully actualized young woman going to another place and getting another thing. Given that Indigenous characters are often isolated, ignored, or misrepresented entirely in American cinema, playing it safe with a proven narrative hook is understandable, but disappointing all the same.
Thirty years ago, Disney sent sequels like this directly to VHS. Nowadays, sequels are most of what they do; sometimes you get an Inside Out 2, which expands its world and embraces more complicated ideas, but most of the time you get movies like Moana 2, which exist to delight the already converted and to appease the stockholders.
