The new live-action version of Moana is a Disney redo that doesn’t work, although it doesn’t work in a way that’s different from the many misfired Disney live-action remakes of the past.
Aladdin was bad because Will Smith’s genie looked ridiculous. The new Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were fine, but neither needed to exist, nor did last year’s remake of Lilo & Stitch. Tim Burton’s Dumbo downright sucked; the remake of The Lion King was an abomination, with no way to tell the lions apart; and the prequel was even worse, wasting the talents of Barry Jenkins. The only one I liked was the one everyone else hated, last year’s Snow White.
Other than that Snow White film, these movies keep making money, though, so Disney keeps churning them out. Now there’s a new version of Moana, arriving just 10 years after the original, and less than 18 months after the theatrical debut of the animated film’s sequel, which was released while the remake was still in production. Moana 2 came out in late-2024, repurposed from its original plan as a Disney+ series, and I barely remember it.
Moana, in all of its versions, tells the story of the daughter of a tribal chief on a Pacific island. While she’s been taught to avoid swimming to the reef, the call to adventure at sea is loud. The remaking of the film drives home that, while it’s a fairly standard Hero’s Journey and largely compelling, it also has too many side quests, and the plot’s overly dependent on multiple MacGuffins.
That includes the inclusion of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who in the animated films voiced the demigod Maui, a character who looked a lot like the performer as it was, and is now played by him in the flesh. If you’re sick of that particular performer, the new film won’t do much to disabuse you of that notion. But he’s not nearly as tiresome as the comic-relief sidekick, a chicken who was annoying in the cartoon and is even more irritating now. More successful is Jemaine Clement, from Flight of the Conchords, who also reprises his cartoon role as the crab who does a glam rock number.
Still, Catherine Laga'aia is an outstanding find as the title character; it’s a good-looking film, and the musical numbers are, for the most part, well-mounted. The new Moana is directed by Thomas Kail, best known as the stage director of Hamilton, which makes sense since Lin-Manuel Miranda at least co-wrote all of the songs. The new Moana isn’t a shot-for-shot remake, but it’s the closest thing to it we’ve gotten from this type of remake. It’s only about 10 minutes longer than the original—Burton’s Dumbo added almost an hour—and the passage of time hasn’t occasioned any changes.
The remakes of the 1990s animated classics made the stories more feminist and give Belle and Ariel a little more ambition, but the original Moana doesn’t need that, since it was already mostly about Moana’s self-actualization.