‘Moana 2’ gets a weak ‘chee hoo’ from me
I wanted to love the ‘Moana’ sequel, but it’s missing the heart of its predecessor — and the seams from its past life as a TV series are way too obvious.
If you’ve been reading Popculturology for the past few years, you know I’m a huge fan of Moana. It’s not just one of my favorite animated movies, it’s one of my favorite movies period.
Despite having to share 2016 with Zootopia (and somehow losing the Oscar for Best Animated Feature to it), Moana is arguably the strongest feature from Disney’s second renaissance period. (Yes, we all love Frozen, but Moana is the one film from that era that I keep coming back to.)
And while Disney and Pixar haven’t hesitated to release sequels to a bunch of their films — Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Inside Out, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story have all been turned into franchises — Moana was going to live out its future as very popular movie on Disney+ with a TV series promised in the future.
That future radically changed when Disney announced earlier this year that it had transformed the Moana series into a feature film that would get a prime Thanksgiving release in theaters.
It’s now Thanksgiving week. And I saw Moana 2 on Tuesday night.
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Before we dive into what I, a dude in his late 30s, thought about Moana 2, let me say that I think kids are going to love this movie. My showing was late enough where there were a few families in the theater, and those kids seemed to like what they were seeing. “That was good,” the boy behind me told his parents as the credits began to roll.
But as a successor to Moana, Moana 2 falls short.
I wanted to love this sequel as much as I love the original, but Moana 2 is very much a TV series that was repurposed into a feature-length movie. When Disney announced this switcheroo, I was worried that it’d be apparent that Moana 2 began its life as a Disney+ show. My worries were valid. You can see the seams, with an episodic structure being pretty apparent roughly every twenty minutes or so during the movie.
Oh, this would be the Kakamora episode, I thought to myself at one point. Oh, and this would be the episode where Moana and Maui reunite, I noticed later.
Once again, kids aren’t going to notice or care about this. But it says a lot about how Disney viewed the future of Moana before scrambling to cash in on a theatrical sequel. (And, oh boy, are they going to cash in at the box office this week.)
Moana 2 isn’t a bad movie. It’s honestly a better than average animated movie. And it’s absolutely better than any of the direct-to-VHS sequels that those of us who grew up in the 90s got from Disney. But in addition to its flaws from being converted from a TV series (there’s also a catchphrase that randomly gets inserted toward the end of the film that I’m pretty sure originally had a song to introduce it but had to go to get down to a theatrical runtime), Moana 2 lacks the heart that made the original Moana special.
