What’s it about?
After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana must journey to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she’s ever faced. This time she’ll take a crew and of course re-unite with everyone’s favourite DemiGod.
What did we think?
Making a follow up to a truly beloved film is always fraught with danger. You want to continue the love affair with the established characters and capture the essence of the first film while also introducing new development and storylines.
Unfortunately Moana 2 leans too much into recreating the first film and not enough into new territory. It’s certainly heartwarming to see Moana, Maui and Alan Tudyk (Hei Hei the chicken) back but we start with a mountain of exposition that was almost overwhelming. Worse, we then basically recreate the original film’s journey from hero sings a song of exploring, our cast find themselves in a supernatural hole, creepy bad guy sings a song that is musically different from the rest of the soundtrack, they escape, Maui sings a funny song… blah blah blah… Moana sings an uplifting song. You get the picture. It’s literally by the numbers with a new coat of paint trying to hide the similarities.
It’s not all negative though – it’s incredibly colorful (both literally and figuratively) and it is still good fun despite the predictability. The strength and talent of Moana hasn’t been diminished and is indeed one of the few things truly built on. The Kakomora (coconut people) are wonderful although I would have loved to see more development of the one who joins the group, and the final stages are truly emotional and wonderful.
It’s not a bad film, but for a franchise that asked “how far I’ll go”, it was disappointing to see them retreading beats instead of exploring completely new narratives.
