Moana 2 Is Enough to Make Anyone Miss Lin-Manuel Miranda

On the fictional South Pacific island of Motunui, there now exists a variety of tween girl known as the “Moanabe” (pronounced “Mo-wannabe”). These eager, sometimes awkward young ladies stan a queen who’s also well known to the rest of the world: the stalwart seafarer Moana, teenage heroine of the smash-hit 2016 movie of that title. Having rescued her people from famine by reversing an ancient curse on the goddess of nature, Moana (once again voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) has gone from being the eldest daughter of the island tribe’s leader to being, in essence, her father’s co-chieftain. Children look up to her, village elders seek out her advice, and her return from a three-day solo sail to a nearby island is celebrated as if it were a major national holiday.

Moana 2 is something of a Moanabe itself, eight years younger than its wildly popular predecessor (Moana earned universal acclaim and more than $600 million worldwide, and remains a fan favorite on streaming) and hell-bent on re-creating, if not its unique charm, then at least its most recognizable gestures and stylistic choices. Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did. (Given that both were hyper-promoted Disney releases, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that the sequel wears its inevitable status as a mass-produced consumer good less lightly than the original.) The small touches and odd character quirks that distinguished the first Moana have been sanded down or, worse, recycled as nostalgic callbacks.

Part of the problem is that, just like any second movie in a franchise this big, the title character can’t help but start out from the position of an overdog. As we first meet her, the slightly older Moana—about three years have passed in the films’ world since the previous chapter—has none of the self-doubt and insecurity that plagued her during her first adventure. She’s a confident, idealistic, powerful young woman—a state of being that, while certainly optimal for her, is not the most conducive to a satisfying character arc for the audience. Instead of watching while our heroine gains the competence and knowledge she needs to accomplish a supremely difficult task, this time we’re presented with a near-superheroic protagonist, a sort of Moses who already knows she can part the waters and walk between them (though in her case, she does it mainly to entertain her baby sister).

True, Moana will later encounter obstacles that call on her to tap into even deeper reserves of that all-important Disney-heroine fuel: belief in oneself. But now that she’s BFFs with a demigod, the shape-shifting trickster deity Maui (voiced, as in the original, by Dwayne Johnson), Moana has a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not hard to pull off a deus ex machina rescue when you’re an actual deus who regularly exchanges high-fives with the ocean.

Once again, the sea voyage at the movie’s center is set in motion by a struggle between the natural and supernatural worlds. This time, an angry god has set a curse upon a distant island that must be lifted in order for the scattered peoples of the world to find one another. Moana is summoned to take on this dangerous task by her wayfinding ancestors, including her late grandmother Tala (Rachel House). At her parents’ insistence, Moana takes along a crew this time, an unlikely trio of misfits: Moni (Huālalai Chung), a teenage boy who idolizes Maui; Loto (Rose Matafeo), a quirky (and possibly lightly queer-coded) teen girl who’s a whiz with a tool kit; and Kele (David Fane), a cranky old farmer who hates the ocean and can’t even swim. They are accompanied by not one but two cute animal sidekicks, also returning from the first film: Moana’s intellectually challenged chicken Hei Hei (Alan Tudyk) and her pet pig Pua.

Wild things start to happen as the travelers’ raft approaches the cursed island of Motufetu. A sort of floating mountain turns out to be the shell of a colossal clam, inside which the voyagers are trapped for a while, Pinocchio-style. There is an extended encounter with the Kakamora, a species Moana also met with the last time around—basically they’re sentient coconuts, animated in Minion-esque fashion, whose specialty is piracy on the high seas. Later on, the crew will meet up with the mysterious underworld goddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).

This middle section is too action-packed to be entirely coherent; every other scene contains a near-capsizing or other brush with maritime disaster, and the antagonists keep piling up. But the shipboard banter is often funny, and the frame is always popping with bold, warm color and witty visual ideas. For example, Maui’s many tattoos (still) have the ability to move around his body like animated figures, their gestures and interactions at times providing commentary on the main story. When new characters are introduced, like a glum-looking neon-green blobfish who secretes a powerful but not deadly neurotoxin, the designs are reliably clever—but no creature stays with you like the bling-hoarding crab voiced by Jemaine Clement in Moana (who returns this time only for a brief nonmusical cameo).

Moana 2 is directed by the team of David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, all of whom make their feature debuts, from a script by Miller and original Moana screenwriter Jared Bush. The project was intended to be made as a TV series, a lineage that may remain visible in that overstuffed middle section.

Though it displays some symptoms of sequelitis, Moana 2 seems to have been made with enthusiasm, love, and impressive attention to detail by a group of gifted artists, many of whom have cultural roots in the South Pacific. The score is once again composed by Mark Mancina in collaboration with the Samoan-born, New Zealand–raised songwriter Opetaia Foa’i, but this time without the assistance of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote or co-wrote the most memorable songs in the 2016 film. The Grammy-winning composing team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear (The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical) contribute songs that slot nicely into their dramatic places without ever leaving an impression as deep as the original’s “How Far I’ll Go,” “Shiny,” “You’re Welcome,” or “We Know the Way” (a rousing seafaring anthem sung mostly in Samoan and Tokelauan). The new movie’s big numbers are virtuosically belted by the golden-throated Cravalho and pleasingly sung-spoken by the Rock, whose incarnation of the conceited yet needy Maui may be the best work of his wrestling-turned-acting-turned-wrestling-again career. But I’d have been hard put to hum a single melody on the soundtrack half an hour after stepping out of the theater.

A midcredits teaser hints unsubtly that there may be another ancient myth–related crisis in the future for Moana and her crew to take on. And true to Disney’s recently established tradition of recycling its animated classics as live-action … less-than-classics, a remake of the first movie is already in the works, also starring Johnson and set to be released in the summer of 2026. The young Polynesian adventurer (please don’t, as she insists in the new movie with a fierce glare, call her a princess) may still be dreaming about how far she’ll go, but audiences will have to make their own choice as to whether they’re up for another ride.