Walt Disney, part LXXXIII: Failure, then learning, then death

MOANA 2

2024

Directed by Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller, and David Derrick Jr.

Written by Jared Bush, Bryson Chun, Bek Smith, and Dana Ledoux Miller

Spoilers: moderate

Note that will eventually be removed: "part 83" is an approximate one, but it is where I believe this film will eventually fall once my not-so-diligently pursued retrospective catalog of Walt Disney animation is done sometime in the next couple of months; meanwhile, since I intended to be done with it before Moana 2 came out on streaming, even if I did not succeed in doing so, it's still best to treat it as just another entry in that series, something I've been sub rosa doing with all of Disney's new-release cartoons for the past two or three years anyhow

The historical bent that one is obliged to take on any Disney animation retrospective means that I've been pretty indulgent about pontificating about the history of the company and the industry as a whole, and nevertheless the discussion that Moana 2 demands irks me something fierce, because what else is there to even say about its shameful industrial origin and the even more shameful success it occasioned, the kind of thing that reminds you that American cinema and possibly all American culture is falling into a black hole and that the event horizon was, by all the evidence, passed some time ago?  Well, I guess my cards are on the table, but I want to be clear about a couple of things that seem like they're contradictory, though I don't think they are: I went into it with as open a mind as possible, given my unavoidable knowledge of how it came to be, and maybe my mind was even too open about it, because I'm not given to the exact same biases that a lot of my contemporaries have regarding corporate art (though I sure seem to be catching up), so it still managed to actually disappoint me; and I'm also only getting to it now because my mind wasn't so open that I ever had the slightest intention of giving the demon what it wanted.

The fundamental fact of Moana 2 is that it is not a real movie, it's a Disney+ television show that was released in theaters, and not because it was recognized as so awesome it deserved the elevation.  (Roughly simultaneously with the "film's" release, new WDAS chief creative officer Jared Bush, who also has a story credit, averred that no, it was too that totally awesome, and that the story team was constantly asked, "why is it not going on the biggest screen you could possibly imagine?"  The simplest explanation is that Bush is an enormous fucking liar, which is presumably why he got to replace outgoing WDAS chief Jennifer Lee, whom one can suppose tired of this part of her job.)  It was sent to theaters almost explicitly because Walt Disney Animation Studios had not made a fully successful animated feature in five years, and because Disney as a whole filmmaking enterprise had suffered just the most abysmally bad 2023 you could imagine, and so naturally Disney CEO Bob Iger was desperate to provide something to Disney shareholders during the company's Q1 2024 earnings call in February, hence he promised them a sequel to Moana, one of Disney's most-beloved movies and (so the data says) their most-viewed movie on Disney+; and moreover he promised them that it would be released nine months later.  It's amusingly horrifying to imagine that he blurted out the first idea to pop into his head literally in the moment of his announcement, but of course that's not really true.  WDAS was informed at least two weeks before that their TV show was now a movie that was going to come out that Thanksgiving, their "canonical" no. 63.

Nine months is, barely, enough time to animate a feature-length CGI cartoon—I mean, I guess it must be, since for its one saving grace Moana 2 doesn't look bad—especially if you're relying on a lot of preexisting design work and the studio doing it is the new satellite in Vancouver, the one that exists mainly to avoid American union rules, and that satellite can be dedicated entirely to its manufacture; yet it is evidently not enough time to turn the first several episodes of a television show into a functioning movie, because that time was approximately "zero days," what with the whole "full-tilt production needs to have started yesterday" thing.  In the interest of accuracy, its original form has in fact been described as a five-episode miniseries, which only makes my heart sink even further, because even with no notice you ought to be able to turn a five-episode miniseries into a functioning movie, as that's basically the same thing except with maybe more obvious act breaks (and the "first act" break in Moana 2 is so violently devoid of finesse that the episode's credits could start and you wouldn't find it remotely unnatural).  But it shouldn't even be hard: if you fail at that, then it's because this company truly does not know how to make anything anymore that isn't just an advertisement for some nebulous future iteration of an intellectual property, which might, hypothetically, be satisfying.  But I'm jumping ahead, and here's what just straight-up unsettles me: the open cravenness of such a move should have been yet another humiliation for a company that doesn't quite seem to understand "humiliation" as a concept... but it wasn't.  It was a triumph.  Goddamn it, this was a streaming television show, so I watched it when it came out on streaming television.  But a hundred million people, give or take, treated it like it was a real movie, and they bought their tickets to see it in a movie theater.  What'd you do that for?

Well, in the final analysis, it is just a movie, so big deal; our poor old world's ending in much more concrete, measurable ways than "my cartoons aren't good anymore," after all.  What I want to be clear about is that none of the above actually needed to be the death knell for Moana 2; I could bellyache about culture and capitalism and all that, but none of that meant it had to be a bad movie.  Moana, I imagine it's worth mentioning, is one of my very favorite Disney cartoons, a late-career masterpiece for Disney's greatest-ever directorial talents, Ron Clements and John Musker (and had this been a real movie, who knows, they might've agreed to direct this one); it's simply a stunning work, a beautiful modern ecofable enfolded into legitimate myth, so that it lands as myth, but one brought to life by way of the pep and joy of a Disney princess musical action-comedy, boasting the best Disney musical soundtrack of any film without Howard Ashman's name on it, while I've entertained the possibility that it's even better-structured as a musical than the ones that do.  All told, Moana was epic, a word I don't like to use because it's become trivialized, but it was.  It was heartfelt and meaningful, and it was complete; it did not ask for a sequel, which is one reason why it was great.  And for all that, there's no reason Another Moana Adventure couldn't be perfectly successful on its own reduced terms, rather than something souldead and tiresome, just because your boss told you you had to make it.  Lots of good pop art has been made under similar dictates, and while such art is likelier to wind up disposable than great, it can be creative and fun in its low stakes, too.  It has not, in the past, needed to wind up so souldead and so tiresome.  (Decades ago, they used to make hundreds of these every year.  They were, in fact, called "episodes of television shows.")  If I had to pinpoint an exact reason, maybe it's because this was originally Another Moana Adventure, nothing more than a DTV plea to not cancel your Disney+ subscription, but then they said it had to be Moana 2, the follow-up to that EPIC. MASTERPIECE., and what would have been merely disposable now becomes hollow, pompous, obnoxious, and a little close to unwatchable.

So: it's three years after Moana, which means in practice that Moana (Auli'i Cravalho), daughter of the chief (Temuera Morrison) of Motonui, has had her character model subliminally stretched on a vertical axis (and hell, it's clearly more work than they had to do for this "movie," so credit to them).  Following the grand odyssey of the first film, the curse of Te Ka has been lifted, and so has Moana's island's ban on exploration.  And so Moana has been wandering about her local area of Polynesia hoping to find the other branches of her lost and long-separated people, I suppose because nobody's ever told her about the Moriori.  Her excursions of these past three years seem to be very local, to an unaccountable degree unless we accept that the dialogue writing has not really been thought-through, and yes, that's exactly what it is, so let's get used to it.  But we begin on an uninhabited island that turns out to be a whole day's (gosh, maybe even 30 hours'!) sail out from Motonui, which Moana has never investigated before now, and upon which she discovers, finally, an artifact of a previous Polynesian settlement (a shard of pottery and decorated pottery at that, so apparently a very old and maybe proto-Polynesian settlement, though giving Moana 2 its due, Moana appears rightly perplexed by what this partial object even was).  What the imagery upon this shard tells her, though, is that people once lived here, though it helps that an ancestral wayfinder (Gerald Ramsey) shows up in a vision to provide her her new quest.  Basically, it's this: there's another curse preventing oceanic travel, and there always has been, which nobody previously mentioned.  The storm god Nalo, offended in some way by humankind, enforced the separation of the ocean's peoples by way of sinking an island, I assume their original island (not Taiwan though, maybe it's Mussau), called Motufetu, to the bottom of the ocean; the vision suggests that finding the island will restore the navigability of the seas, or something to that effect.  The pottery shard, accordingly, wasn't crucial, but then neither was the vision, because a comet appears over Motonui next, and really, what's Moana waiting for, a sextant and compass?

She puts together a crew for a longer voyage than she undertook last time, not that there will ever arrive any sense that it is a longer voyage or that they provide any true functionality, but this was, as noted, supposed to be a television show and so a cast theoretically capable of supporting jokey interactions on a twenty-five minute basis is what we get, all of whose names I had to look up, though I could've accurately reported their stereotype: Loto (Rose Matafeo), the fiddling, oblivious, and self-aggrandizing shipwright; Kele (David Fane), a farmer who doesn't want to be there but got drafted to, I guess, grow crops on the boat or something; and Moni (Hualalai Chung), seemingly Motonui's priest albeit one rendered in terms of modern fan culture rather than anything lame like "reverence" or "piety."  Off they go on the ocean, and soon enough find plot obstacles strewn in their way.  Meanwhile, what of Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the demigod that Moana half-tamed in the first film?  He's already gone ahead independently of his more-vulnerable human friend on the same mission and been captured, and spends the first half of the film in some sort of baffling netherrealm until such time as Moana and company arrive to rescue him from another demidivine figure, Matangi (Awhimai Fraser), though she's bad.

Well, I fucking guess she is, though Moana 2 has insufficient story content to actually reach a point where we can decide; if I may use a Clements & Musker movie comparison, namely Hercules, maybe she's Megara and maybe she's Hades, but I don't know because she's actually fulfilling the Tamatoa function from the original film as the miniboss bad guy you run into during the middle of a quest, except she fails to resolve into "bad" despite having an entire song devoted to her philosophy ("Get Lost"—which is to say, "get lost" in the sense of "lose yourself, to the adventure") that, frankly, comes off substantially more as a sexual overture towards Moana than it does an exegesis of Matangi's character or her place in this narrative (and would be much cooler if it actually were).  We can talk about the songs in a second, but the main thing is she's actually pretty neat; Matangi captured Maui, and she's unmoored to solid reality a bit like the better depictions of Dracula, and that's certainly antagonistic enough to scan, though after Maui is freed she doesn't reappear till a mid-credits scene that promises that next time on Moana: The TV, we might have a story, despite her manipulations having, apparently, driven the plot this time around already... at least, I think.  And I didn't not credit Nalo on accident; I will not credit the performer of a character who doesn't show up in the actual film he's the villain of.

But Matangi is slotted into her place in the structure, which is almost exactly the structure of Moana for the sound reason that that was a film that worked, though it had the exact dimensions it had because Moana was an inexperienced heroine then, with enormous yearnings but almost equally enormous self-doubt.  Moana 2 pretty much just repeats Moana's first act without any actual narrative content to call its own: what's not a barbaric, artless callback to something that was magical about the first film is just introducing, with extreme brusqueness, the new characters, all of whom are pretty miserable company.  Loto is the only one who has a combination of personality and character class such as even recommends her, and she's still mildly annoying; the old man who can't swim—in Polynesia, really—is genuinely aggravating but I suppose a sturdy enough type; the priest makes me want to vomit a little, insofar as what he brings to the table is self-insert Maui fanfic, a thing this movie explicitly describes thus, with the word "fanfic," and while I think there really are some interesting academic comparisons to be made between fan fiction and religion, good God is this ever not the time and place to do that, in a way that simply cheapens a follow-on to a mythic tale that you suspect is already playing very fast-and-loose with "the gods and monsters of Polynesian mythology" in favor of "whatever."

Likewise, if you didn't like the "tweeting" joke or the "[Disney] princess" joke in Moana, and of course you shouldn't, because they are vile stains on an otherwise immaculate film, that's a lot of Moana 2, not so much you can't grit your teeth through it, but far more than is reasonable.  Calling something "fanfic" arguably isn't even the worst thing here: that's when Johnson confuses Maui with Aladdin's Genie and straight-up has him explain the phrase "butt dial" as a colloquialism his interlocutor would understand "in about 2000 years."  For shame, you know?  And it bothers me, personally, on a deeper level because Moana was an allegory about the historical Long Pause of Polynesian migration that we don't really understand the reasons for, so we might as well make a grandly mythic cartoon about it, and the Long Pause started about 1200 years ago, so the army of writers on Moana 2 clearly didn't even get that about the first movie.  Even poor Moana is affected: there's something about Cravalho's performance in this one that is way less invested in the mythic time human she's playing, and I'm not sure if it's her or the screenplay or just the context she's been placed in now, or if only Clements & Musker have this power, because Cravalho was riding the razor's edge of "highly contemporized and relatable version of mythic time human" already.  But whatever way it happened, she's falling off so much more readily.  Helping absolutely nothing is that Moana 2 is actually worse and more anachronistic when it's trying to be hefty and sincere, flopsweating across 100 minutes that contain the phrase "our story" or "your story" so many times that even variations on "how far [I/we'll] go," which is the other major plank of dialogue-writing because she sang that in the first movie, can't keep up.  I didn't like it even once, because the phrase feels generated from ten year-old Marginalized Group History Month tweets that even in the moment of their publication already kind of felt like they were written by robots; but by the sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth time "their story" was invoked—in this movie, that doesn't have the decency to have much of any complete story, and don't that beat all?—I was just blown away that a movie could so ineffectively, falsely insist upon its own importance like this.  I think the count eventually hits the mid-teens, but I hadn't started the tally till the sixth or seventh.  It's really quite extraordinary.

But I was talking structure, and this just sort of fills in Moana template, even when it's not germane, like having her debate herself over whether or not she shall heed the call to adventure.  This is given inorganic motivation on behalf of a little sister (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda) whom they clearly considered putting on the boat, but then decided that was irresponsible or something, and it's just as well because she's irritating, though having some investment in a new character, even if it's done by brutish means, might've been a better idea.  (I don't really know why it's not Moana's daughter, except for extrinsic optics reasons—she can be 25 now if you want, you control the parameters, guys—but it's hard not to see that as automatically more dramatically interesting from any number of angles than "oh, a sister that's not even part of the plot, that's something, all right.")  Following that, she gets on the ocean and new people are available to be initiated into its mysteries; following that, they mix things up a little, because now she encounters the Kakamoran coconut pirates before she rescues Maui (and what better to do with the Kakamora, as fine a notion for pleasurable seriocomic cartoon villainy as we've seen in an age, than to give them backstory, and make them misunderstood outsiders?—well, leaving them to Moana, and coming up with a whole new notion of our own, but let's not get nuts—get it, nuts?); and following that, a demivillain is escaped from and then they fail to have character conflict (or even a character dynamic) because that would require "fucking characters" and outside of Moana and Maui, who reconciled all their conflict back in the previous film, we don't have those, so we immediately chart a course towards the finale, which copies Moana's decision to revolve around a rather impersonal, genuinely divine villainy, without even remotely understanding why Moana did that, or without the twisty narrative of Moana that made that the ineffably correct decision.  Moana, Maui, and friends fight a lightning storm.  There is a twist, but it feels like a whole hell of a cheat (islands aren't "islands" when they're submerged, you know?), and if it's not a cheat, it seems that they could've avoided the whole imbroglio by thinking about it for thirty seconds beforehand.

In between, somewhat buffering these things rather than being integral to them, we have some songs, emerging uncomfortably amidst a few bibs and bobs provided by returning talents Opetaia Foa'i and Mark Mancina, neither man doing anything to outright dishonor himself like everyone else is, though they're clearly at their best when they can just do the same thing the rest of the movie's doing and recapitulating the first one.  But that's not what you'll walk away with.  I've always said that Lin-Manuel Miranda was never better, nor in fact good, outside of his work on the original Moana, and accordingly I've always been deeply suspicious of how much that soundtrack could've possibly been his one brush with brilliance and commended most of my admiration to the other two guys; but I guess I have to give him that credit after all.  Replacing Miranda are Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, whom I feel sorry for (sort of) in that they probably didn't deserve to be thrust to what I assume will be a career pinnacle like this; like a number of people on Moana 2, they didn't really have any business, at this stage of their careers, being put on the marquee of a major theatrical motion picture.  Their biggest claim to fame was a TikTok musical fan fiction series (if I understand it correctly) that became The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, and hey, I like Bridgerton too, so maybe that's better.

This, unfortunately, is like a Moana companion album subtitled "songs inspired by the motion picture" in the most pejorative sense one could spit such a phrase.  It is very bad without even being (cf. Wish) blow-your-hair-to-the-back-of-the-auditorium bad, just—in the main—boringly bad, and weirdly clunky as tunes, vague and hackish and shockingly uncatchy rip-offs of Moana's songs, for example "Beyond" (say, is that how far she'll go?), or "What Could Be Better Than This?", which incorporates a rap verse like Miranda might do, and which is somehow the best song (song part) in the movie thanks to it offering some measure of characterization to Loto, who is abrasive and all but at least her lyrics contemplate the inevitability of death, as we've all been doing during these last nine ceaseless years of Disney animation's decline.  "Can I Get a Chee Hoo?" is Moana 2's response to "You're Welcome," complete with an attempt to replicate "You're Welcome's" intoxicating stylized animation, and it's fine-ish, though it seems, like stretches of this screenplay, to be operating under the misapprehension that "chee hoo" was a legitimate catchphrase.  The exception to the sub-Moana riffing is Matangi's big seduction-to-the-dark-side-that-informs-nothing-subsequently number, the aforementioned "Get Lost," which at a minimum sure is different: it begins with a musical gesture that I defy you not to automatically complete, "first I was afraid, I was petrified," and while obviously you oughtn't get your hopes up that it's one-tenth that good, it's generically similar, and I wondered what it was doing here (and I'm still mystified by what it does), even if it is also the best song (whole song) we get.

Now, I did say, 3000 words ago, that Moana 2 looks good, and... it does, in terms of "it looks about 90% of the way to Moana" in terms of its technological aptitude.  I think this 2024 film looks mostly as good as that 2016 film—I don't know if it should be inordinately proud of that, but Moana was a highwater mark, and I'm not disappointed in how the craftspeople applied their craft to individual shots or movements or effects animations, even if it's sort of a bummer that nobody even considered doing anything to soften the vinyl-like quality of Moana's skin texturing, and, probably as a result of its abbreviated production cycle, that quality is even more salient now.  (My wife says the terrific hair animation got worse too, but I don't know if that's just because she disliked the movie about as much as I did or not; I merely forward it as a possibility.)  But, against the general stasis that WDAS has held itself in as regards its character animation all throughout its CGI era, the Vancouver satellite acquitted themselves fairly well; there's stiffness, but it's "Disney stiffness," and there's a penchant for snappiness that's not unlikeable (at the risk of embarrassing myself because the scene's a little goofy, I earnestly enjoyed Moana's response to a dance challenge), and it's encompassing fairly good "acting," particularly on Loto and Moana, with the animators recapturing the spunky personality of the latter and her conversational penchant for sarcastic fighting retreats, which is great if you have no desire for the life-changing quest she went on in Moana to have changed her in any particularly noticeable way.

The film somehow wound up with three directors, maybe out of an idea that that would speed things up 50%, I don't know, though it's hard to see how one of them, Dana Leloux Miller—a writer (also a co-writer here) and producer of live-action movies with no experience whatsoever in animation—would have done so.  I mean, the blunt way to put it is that they were assigned a DTV project and it was too late to do anything else but ride them to the finish line.  Hence the other two, Jason Hand and David Derrick Jr., and can you ever tell that a couple of story/layout artists with no directorial experience are directing this.  I say that like it means something—where else are you going to get animation directors from? a few places, but this is a very normal course—but I do intend it to mean that it feels like story artists rather than directors made it.

This is what I mean: most any given sequence is clear, and it has flair and interstitial gags, or drama and grandeur if that's more appropriate, and the camera layout is dynamic and interesting, all that good stuff; it flows together as a motion picture just terribly.  The very opening scene sort of tells you what it'll be like: Moana is on a new island, and, gee, I hate to be racist, guys, but cartoon Polynesian islands kind of look a bit alike, so maybe a shot of her arriving at the island rather than a shot of her running across its beach would've been useful if you didn't want me to assume it's Motonui, and not be entirely sure it wasn't until she said to the chicken (Alan Tudyk) and the pig (the superfluous pig's here now, great, that justifies everything), "let's go home."  We know Maui's imprisoned but it's in some sort of incomprehensible place that he wound up in after flying into a storm where unvisualized violence occurred to him for unknown reasons, and I mainly know where because the big sphere is probably a pearl inside that giant clam from the trailer (it's also imaginable that the "reason" is Johnson's a little put out by doing Maui as a cartoon when he was so jazzed about the live-action Moana remake they've been threatening for several years, so he's in this movie much, much less*).

These are storytelling choices, I realize, but I don't know, for me they felt more confusing (and confused) than tantalizing, and the jelly-like softness of a screenplay where things happen mostly as a result of "you know, 'cause" is a bad place to make confusing storytelling choices, and, fundamentally, "having a story at all" seems like something directors ought to impose on a narrative film, just as a matter of course.  But sometimes this uncertainty just erupts into the actual individual sequences themselves, like in what is probably the most effective thing in the movie, from a design and "action cinema" standpoint, thanks to the overwhelming visual of that giant clam (gross eyes and everything); and that's awesome, but there's just a sort of static "all right, let us have a long and involved discussion of shared history and joint strategy with our new allies, the coconut people, while that clam sits there in the reverse-angle backdrops" sensation to this sequence, and it's a sensation that sucks out all the urgency of, well, being sucked into the maw of a giant Goddamn clam.  That's kind of what Moana 2 manages throughout: it sucks the urgency out of characters and a setting that, the first time, moved like legend.  I wish Moana 2 didn't even exist; but it pains me even more that Disney was so richly rewarded for slopping it up.

Score: 4/10

*And as for Little Maui, barely vestigial, and I literally forgot he existed here (this is an edit!), despite Eric Goldberg returning to supervise the forty aggregate seconds of 2-D animation for the wee tattoo dude, and somehow needing to share this load with a co-supervisor (Mark Henn came along for the ride).