Moana has a restless spirit.  When we first met her in the eponymous movie from 2016, Moana was the only one on her island of Motunui who wasn’t happy with the status quo.  She didn’t want to just exist, she wanted to go places.  Simply put, she lives for adventure.  When she’s warned by her father not to venture beyond the reef, that’s exactly what she tries to do.  Moana fails, but that setback doesn’t stop her from trying again because she’s an explorer at heart, a feeling she conveys perfectly when she sings “How Far I’ll Go”.  (See the line where the sky meets the sea?  It calls me.)

As fate would have it, a blight infected Moana’s island and put everyone’s immediate future in doubt.  Unwilling to sit around and talk about the situation with others, Moana put her dreams into action and went forth on her own to save her people.  Over the course of the Moana, she rescued the demigod Maui and restored the heart of Te Fiti, which cured the blight and restored the natural balance of Motunui.  Not bad for her first trip away from home.

In Moana 2, which takes place three years after the events in the original movie, we learn that Moana’s success didn’t turn her into a full-time explorer.  Instead, she’s being groomed to replace her father as chief.  A jaunty montage shows us how being chief is roughly the same as being a politician.  Moana attends tribal meetings, does meet-and-greets, teaches others in the art of the hula, and so on.  Her responsibilities effectively make her even more land-locked than before, and I waited for her to let out a loud “Ugh!” after a long, boring day of public service.

Fortunately for Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) , she can take her boat out occasionally to get away from pleasing everyone.  Seeing how invigorated she is when she’s back in her element, I wondered why she just didn’t keep sailing and never looked back.  Goodbye, Father!  Good luck with the coconut harvest!  Moana’s not that kind of girl, though.  She is, however, intent on finding the other races she’s heard about, but so far her travels have proven fruitless beyond finding empty islands and ruins of people who no longer live there.

Meanwhile, Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is off on his own looking for the island of Motufetu and gets captured in the process.  When his captor asks why he doesn’t call his bestie Moana for help, he refuses out of pride and concern for her safety.  (He’s a kind-hearted braggart, which .)  Don’t worry, Maui will team-up with Moana soon enough.  The movie just needs to point Moana in his direction.  This comes by way of a vision she has, where one of her ancestors explains that her people will become extinct if she doesn’t find a way to raise the island of Motufetu.  (The sea-storm god Nalo sank it eons ago to keep humans down.  Guess it worked!)  When the island is risen,  Motunui will be connected to the other islands and that whole extinction-thing can be avoided.  

Is Moana 2 really using genetic diversity as the crisis that underpins this story?  Yes, although it never really states that out loud.  Instead, it stresses how cool it would be for everyone to be connected.  Why are those connections so important to head off extinction?  Well…good luck explaining that one, parents.

Since the journey to Motufetu is long and difficult, Moana assembles a crew of oddballs to join her.  She recruits Moni (Hualalai Chung), who is huge and a huge Maui fanboy who can read pictograms.  Moana also invites Loto (Rose Matafeo) for the trip, because she designs and builds canoes.  (Ancient times were all about STEM.)  And since everyone will need to eat on this trip to the bottom of the ocean, an old farmer named Kele (David Fane) is brought along to keep plants alive and provide curmudgeonly vibes.

And away they go!  After teaching her crew to all work together (via a lame song in a movie filled with them), the crew meet up with the dastardly Kakamora.  In a weird twist, these coconut-wearing pirates aren’t bad guys but actually good guys who just want to go home.  After agreeing to help them, Moana and company must travel through a gigantic clam to get to the portal that would take them to where Motufetu is.  (The plot of this movie resembles a very trippy Star Trek episode at times.)  This is the place where Maui is imprisoned, but before Moana frees him she befriends his captor, she has to get past a weird vampire bat-lady named Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).  Even though Matangi works for Nalo, she frees Maui and lets everyone go through the clam portal to Motufetu.  But the island is still very sunk, and Nalo is still cheesed at humanity.  Can you say cataclysmic, lightning-filled climax?  Thankfully, Maui is along for the ride with his Chee Hoo’s to save the day.

Recommendation

Even though it has everything one could ask for in a sequel, Moana 2 doesn’t amount to much.  If it were a cake, it would be one that failed to rise even though the filmmakers followed the recipe to the letter.  They included all of the ingredients that made the original so successful, and even tossed in a few new ones to spice things up a bit, but the results are flat.  Like a cake that didn’t rise, Moana 2 lacks the spark that made the original so lively and fun.

There isn’t one thing that’s to blame for why Moana 2 is such a mediocre experience, but several.  The new characters introduced don’t add anything to the story and mainly take up space.  The journey Moana goes on to save her people feels more like a chore than a thrilling, life-changing experience.  Instead of giving Moana time to pause and appreciate her beautiful surroundings and reflect on her path, this movie keeps her busy; first with dull tribal responsibilities, then mentoring her crew of misfits until finally she’s dogging lightning bolts on the raging sea.  The plot drives this story and not Moana’s evolution, to the movie’s detriment.

On the plus side, Moana 2 is better than the last two Walt Disney Animation Studio offerings.  It’s more bright and colorful than the dismal Strange World.  It’s also refreshingly sincere, which places it lightyears beyond the abysmal corporate marketing exercise that was Wish.  What Moana 2 lacks is a sense of vibrancy and joy that made the first one so enjoyable.  I immediately knew something was off when one song after another came and went without making me feel a thing.  Moana 2 is the spiritual cousin of Frozen II, another sequel that puts all of its energy into looking and sounding like what came before without making a case for why it exists–beyond making money.  Moana 2 is likeable, but any enjoyment to be had is based on our familiarity of what came before, not what we are seeing now.

Moana 2 is “aggressively fine”, making it equivalent to several other animated films that came out earlier this year (ex: Kung Fu Panda 4, Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie).  Moana is still an engaging character, full of energy and optimism.  And even though he’s only on hand in a limited way, The Rock’s boisterous performance as Maui is as good as before.  The movie is entirely forgettable, but an acceptable way to pass the time with family.  Mildly recommended.

Analysis

I don’t know why, but my family and I hadn’t rewatched Moana in the eight years since it was released in theaters.  If we have, it’s been after flipping through cable channels and landing on Freeform.  Since my memories of the movie have faded, we watched it the evening before seeing Moana 2 in a theater.  Even though the two movies mostly look and sound the same, the difference in quality between them is as crystal clear as the waters surrounding Moana’s island.  In crafting this sequel out of material intended as a Disney+ series, the magic that made the original so special has disappeared.  Moana 2 is still charming and entertaining, just on a very limited basis.

The Songs

Because the songs in Moana were so memorable, it was perhaps unrealistic on my part to expect the sequel to hit the same mark.  Unfortunately, Moana 2’s drop-off in song quality is apparent from the beginning.  Moana’s big number, “Beyond”, pales in comparison to “How Far I’ll Go”.  Auliʻi Cravalho has a great voice and gives the song everything she has, but it just doesn’t have the transcendent quality as her anthem from the original.  “Beyond” is a beautifully crafted song on a technical level, but it doesn’t have the soaring, emotional power that makes “How Far I’ll Go” so transcendent.

Other songs in Moana 2 are designed to be equivalent to those in the first movie, but they’re lackluster.  The introductory song, “We’re Back”, boisterously explains what things are like now on Motunui, but has none of the playful condescension of “Where We Are”.  Maui’s “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” is a cheerleading song intended to pump Moana up for the challenge and has none of the boastful narcissism of “You’re Welcome”.  Matangi’s “Get Lost”, the villain anthem of the sequel, is another pep talk set to music, and not a show-stopper like Tamatoa’s “Shiny”.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to expect the same results without Lin-Manuel Miranda on hand to give the material the Broadway touch, but to use a baseball analogy, when you knock things out of the park the first time up, getting a walk next time isn’t impressive.  This has been a problem for Walt Disney Animation Studios since Moana, where Encanto is the only musical with memorable songs.  (Can you remember a song from Frozen II or Wish?)

What’s the crisis, exactly?

Moana 2’s crisis, or the reason for Moana to leave home again, is a bizarre contraption.  In the original, the crisis was straightforward.  Plants were suffering from black rot and the fish had deserted the island’s shores.  The blight was caused by Maui stealing the heart of Te Fiti to give humanity the power of creation.  Since his actions threw nature out of balance, Moana was required to rescue Maui and ask him to restore what he had stolen.  Moana has a simple ecological message at its core:  be good to nature and it will be good to you.

The plot of Moana 2 is centered on a crisis that is extremely vague.  Since the events in the last movie, Motunui has healed and Moana and her people are doing well.  Then her ancestor tells her in a vision that her people will become extinct if they remain isolated.  Moana’s mission boils down to mitigating pitfalls of inbreeding by increasing the size of the gene pool.  This is a very odd crisis to task Moana with solving.  First, it’s not imminent, because it would take generations  for this to affect Moana’s people.  Second, because the subject of inbreeding is a touchy one for a children’s movie, it’s camouflaged with the notion of how good it is to be connected with other people.  Which it is, but the movie never bothers to explain why it’s so important for those  connections to be made.

Too many characters

Moana epitomized essential storytelling in that it was about Moana and her mentor, Maui.  She wants to learn how to sail and save her people, Maui helps her accomplish both.  Adventures  happen along the way, but the focus of the movie is on their relationship.  The chicken is along for the ride to provide slapstick and the sea helps out periodically, but for a movie with an epic scope it’s remarkably intimate.

Moana 2 introduces several new characters who are somewhat interesting but really are superfluous overall.  Moana’s little sister Simea is cute, but only exists as proof that her mother and father have a loving relationship.  Moana’s wacky crew are recruited to help her on her journey to the sunken island, but exist only as broad outlines of characters.  Moni is a Maui fanboy, very similar to Kung Fu Panda’s Po.  Loto is a nerd girl who talks fast and likes making boats.  She reminded me of Kate McKinnon’s character in Ghostbusters: Answer the Call.  Kele is a grumpy old farmer who seems directly inspired by Ed Asner’s Carl in Up.  

While none of these new characters are “bad”, they leave no mark on the story other than to help Monan out.  Considering that this movie was distilled from a Disney+ animated series already in production, I imagine that these characters would have been fleshed out over the course of several episodes.  In their movie incarnation, they have no backstory and only a single personality quirk that defines them.  They’re bland like the characters were in Strange World, non-player characters who you don’t care if they are around or not.

When Moana and her crew set sail, Moana must teach them to stop being obsessive and work together.  Moni and Lotu definitely have OCD issues, because he just wants to keep documenting their story while she wants to alter the canoe while they’re sailing.  For his part, Kele just wants to stay below deck and tend to his plants, which is understandable.  Am I weird for wondering how he kept the plants alive over the course of their journey using only seawater?  He’s the funniest character of the three but I had no idea how he was doing his critical job.

Moana and Maui are after the same thing?

In the most obvious sign that Maui was stitched into the movie after the fact, the movie reveals that both he and Moana are both trying to get to the sunken island.  Why wouldn’t Maui tell Moana that he’s going to help restore the oceanic currents that connect the islands, so that she doesn’t go off and try to do it herself?  Maybe he didn’t tell her to protect her, but that seems silly.  But if that’s the case, what compelled Maui to go off on his own in the first place?  Did he get a vision too?  Or was raising Motufetu just the next item on his to-do list?

I know I’ve seen a lot of Disney movies over the years, but I couldn’t have been the only person who thought of Thor: Ragnarok when Maui was bound and left hanging on a rope.

The oddest villains yet

Aside from how the movie pulls a Terminator 2 and makes the Kakamora nice guys, Moana 2’s definition of villainy is incredibly muddled.  What was Nalo’s beef with humanity?  Why does Matangi live inside a giant clam with a legion of bats?  They’re colorful villains, but don’t have much in terms of personality and their motivations are unclear.  Compare them to the slovenly charming Tamatoa, or the fiery Te Kā, and it’s obvious that Moana 2’s bad guys are a significant downgrade.

Simple pleasures

The movie isn’t without its pleasures.  The biggest laugh I had in the movie was when Heihei screamed.  Someday, Disney must give us a behind-the-scenes feature with Alan Tudyk in a sound booth screaming his lungs out.

The movie expands the presence of Pua the pig, and while he’s undeniably cute, there’s no reason to have both him and Heihei (the chicken) tag along even though both are always in danger.  (I cynically believe the idea was to sell merchandise based on the two of them.)

I also liked it when the fish that climbed onto Maui just in time to be fed slime belched by a monster.

Maui’s tattoo version of himself is still a funny riff on Jiminy Cricket.

Seeing Gramma Tala again, even if she’s a Force Ghost now, was welcome.  Her idea of dancing to clear one’s mind in order to see the way forward is a great idea.  

With that in mind, I sincerely hope the filmmakers devote ample time to perfecting their hula’s before they start on Moana 3.  Moana and the families who love her deserves better.