Following the great success of the first film from 2016, Moana 2 was released to theaters November 27th this year. After saving her people by fulfilling an ancient quest in the previous film, Moana is revered as a hero on the island. However, a new problem arises when she gets a vision, telling her that her peoples’ story will end if she does not unite everyone from different islands across the ocean. She now has to embark on another journey to find people from an island that will bring the people together and save their lives.
As you might have already noticed, the first problem with this movie is that the plot is already very similar to the previous one. Moana has to journey across the ocean to save her people. Although it is for a slightly different reason, it already follows a structure that reflects the first installment. In this one, she does bring along a couple side characters, and while they have their moments, they are not very memorable. They are all very surface level and hardly have anything to offer to the plot. This tends to be a bad trend with many movies, having side characters that fail to make an impact on the movie you are watching. They are sort of just there to fill up space. Even Maui, one of the main characters of the last movie, hardly does anything of note. It feels like the growth he experienced in the last movie is not visible in this one.
Even Moana herself in this movie does not feel nearly as strong of a character as she does in the first movie. What this movie lacks is establishing a person struggle for the titular character. The last movie sees her personal struggle revolving around trying to figure out who she is, as her passion for exploring the ocean collides with familial expectations. In Moana 2, her personal conflict is non-existent. She has to save her people, which is simply an external goal. We are introduced to her little sister who she feels guilty for leaving behind on her journey, and wants to make her proud, but it feels very shoehorned in and is barely brought up.
The songs are overall pretty mediocre. There are a couple decent ones, but for the most part they are nothing to write home about. None of the songs are insultingly bad like they were in Wish, though that movie does set the bar pretty low. Auli’i Cravolo’s voice is still outstanding, but it is plastered on songs that do not really evoke any strong feelings.
The plot is not awful, it is just very average. What you can attribute a lot of this movie’s problems to is that it was never planned to be a movie. It was planned to be a short TV-series that would be released on Disney+. We will never know for sure the reason Disney decided to pivot and make this a full-length feature film, but we can assume. Their last two movies, Wish and Strange World, flopped at the box office, and maybe they needed a movie they knew would earn them a lot of money. Moana was a huge hit when it first released, and is the most watched movie on Disney+ by quite a big margin. Disney knew that a sequel to it would be impossible to fail, and they were right. Moana 2 is performing fantastically at the box office now, which is worrying. I guess I wasn’t helping by going to theaters to see it, though.
I am afraid that the success of this movie sets a bad precedent for the future of Disney Animation Studios. I think going forward we will see less and less original movies, and more sequels. They are already planning a live-action Moana, so you can see that they really want to milk this franchise. It also did not help that Wish and Strange World were two original movies that flopped. Disney knows they can count on sequels to give them money, and original movies will be a toss-up.
The movies we have to look forward to now from Disney are a live action Lilo and Stitch and a sequel to Zootopia. I am not saying these movies are going to be bad, for that we have to wait and see, but they are not original and it does hurt as someone who is passionate about animation. I long for another movie like Encanto from 2021, an original movie with so much thought and care put into it. I hope we can see something like that soon, but I’m not counting on it.