Moana (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

I've long been an apologist for Disney's live action remakes, for reasons shared elsewhere on this blog. And despite not liking a handful of them, I find myself of a new opinion entirely when it comes to the new Moana: utter ambivalence.

While it's patently silly for Disney to remake something only a decade old, this is the kind of material they should be adapting. Human-centered narratives, in my apparently controversial opinion, should center the human element, so I tend to prefer such stories in live action. Why we haven't, then, gotten the likes of Hercules or The Hunchback of Notre Dame is beyond my comprehension, while Lady and the Tramp and its ilk fill up Disney+ with nightmare fuel. Animation is exactly for stories that cannot be told by real people in front of real cameras: stories like The Little Mermaid or Treasure Planet that would be almost entirely animated anyway. Yet in this expensive-looking production, I could not help but find myself annoyed that so much appeared to be CGI, and not much of it of more realistic quality than in the animated original.

Yet director Thomas Kail (mostly a theatre director, but whose Fosse/Verdon is still criminally underappreciated) and his extensive production team (including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dwayne Johnson, returning to his role as Maui, and Auli'i Cravalho, who does not appear but who sings a new song during the credits) take great pains to make this film an almost shot-for-shot remake. One wonders why. The history of "The Long Pause" is intriguing, and surely within the past ten years there has been sufficient research into Polynesian history and interest in culture in general to have improved the storytelling of this otherwise simple plot and its straightforward themes. And in a year when The Odyssey will surely sweep the summer (and yearly) "best of" lists, it feels odd that Moana couldn't expand her horizons and seek out any new adventures.

The material literally sings for an inexplicable compulsion, a call from beyond the familiar to prove oneself and save one's home. Why, then, are we locked into the exact same screenplay with the exact same adventures? Only two years ago, Moana 2 gave us more options to play with -- though we can certainly debate the value of those options -- so this feels like a disappointing return to basics. Apart from a couple new guffaw-inducing jibes from Johnson's narcissist demigod, even the laughs are exactly the same, down to precisely timed beats involving the braindead google-eyed sidekick Heihei. 

Thankfully, it's all very fun and very pretty, much like the original. The ocean, delightfully animated in its fantasy, pseudo-anthropomorphized form, is wonderfully rendered, and I certainly don't tire of the tropical vistas of thickly jungled islands. Rena Owen is the pulsing heart of the film as Moana's grandmother who sets her on her quest and returns like a Force-ghost in Moana's climactic turn; her gravitas and whimsy combine in an effective characterization that wrung tears from my eyes more than once. Jemaine Clement returns, too, as Tamatoa, the monstrous crab who hoards shiny things, in a replicated scene of the original film's standout moment, but his voice does feel tired and uninspired this time around. Too bad he wasn't given some fresh material to crack open and masticate.

The strength of this movie lies almost solely in its human element. To that end, the film's first act is easily its strongest, as Moana is chosen by the ocean as a child and as she grows into her father's daughter, a chief-in-training to lead her island's people. The first big musical number is magnificent, and I found myself repeatedly wishing that Kail leaned even more into his theatre background and away from the original film. How much more satisfying it would be to have long takes of masses of Motunui islanders harvesting coconuts and fish while dancing and singing, instead of cartoon-esque choppy edits and eye-popping set pieces! Yet in seeing real people in gorgeous production design, we are nevertheless transported into an escapist fantasy as Disney does best. Alas, we must settle for what we've been given, and its mediocrity and redundancy won't work for everyone, though I had a lovely time singing along in my otherwise empty cinema.