Not Welcome
This is exhausting and I’m tired of repeating myself.
Moana
Director: Thomas Kail • Writers: Jared Bush, Dana Ledoux Miller, based on the animated film
Starring: Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams
USA • 1hr 55mins
Opens Hong Kong July 9 • I
Grade: C-
This is getting to be ridiculous. Disney’s ongoing raid of its own library has possibly reached its nadir – or apex depending on your point of view. It’s one thing to remake (poorly) The Little Mermaid. At least there’s a new generation to tap on that one. More “logical” is remaking Dumbo and Snow White, which in fairness were pushing 80 and 90 years old when they were released in 2019 and ’25. But FFS John Musker and Ron Clements’s refreshing Moana is barely 10 years old. We don’t need a shot-for-shot rehash of a perfectly lovely – and modern – story that’s already been fully told, well, that’s easily accessed, doesn’t need a running socio-anthropological contextualisation while it’s playing and didn’t even need a sequel. It didn’t work in the “live action” The Lion King (which was, essentially, soullessly animated anyway) and it’s not working for Thomas Kail’s “live action” Moana.
And Moana is almost a carbon copy, with one new song added to the Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack (“Along the Way”) and one new shudder-inducing “singing” and “dancing” sequence from returning co-star Dwayne Johnson’s Maui; no one needs to see this. As happened in the 2016 version, young Polynesian Motunui resident Moana (first timer Catherine Laga’aia), possesses a curiosity about what’s beyond the reef that compels the ocean to choose her for a mission to restore the heart of Te Fiti that Maui stole a millennia before. Guided by the spirit of her adored grandmother Tala (absolute legend Rena Owen) and along with her janky-looking CG chicken, Moana heads out to enlist Maui for his help, atone for his crime and save the world, so on and so forth. And they sing. Well, she does.
“Have I seen this before?”
Let me just repeat: Moana is roughly 10 years old. The original animated film was a colourful, vivid and relatively feminist story about a young woman finding her sea legs – literally and figuratively – for herself and her community, damning the torpedoes and leaping into action when she’s needed. She’s smart and independent, and she can carry a tune. The film’s art was fluid, engaging and bright, and the action defied physics in a way that only animation can and that we accept as simply part of the fantasy. What narrative strengths this Moana has can be chalked up to its fidelity to the original – thus proving its own irrelevance.
While Laga’aia doesn’t quite have the pipes that OG Moana Auli’i Cravalho does, she acquits herself just fine on the quasi-Broadway front, but Johnson makes a case for animating some of us. Decked out in a jarring wig, he lumbers around the sand in front of a green screen looking uncomfortable while he sing-talks “You’re Welcome” not nearly as charmingly as he did the first time around. You know what he looks like? He look’s like a jacked wrestler trying to find the 2 and the 4. Johnson (who is a producer on the film) never claimed to be a song-and-dance man, so I’ll let it slide, because more offensive than his awkward soft shoe is the volume of CGI so obviously on display; CGI that tones down the visual joy evident in the original and buries it, bizarrely, under muddy, flat, dull images that make everything look plastic. Or worse, like AI slop. Theatre director (In the Heights, Hamilton in London) Kail and his army of animators could have picked up the proverbial ball and run amok with imagination but instead they opted for familiar, safe storytelling that pleases shareholders and does little for creativity.
Speaking of imagination, by no stretch of it do fat box office grosses of (mostly) Hollywood films mean much in the grand scheme, but regardless of whether or not we like it, this is media that creates culture, Hollywood is still the benchmark for movie “quality” and cash receipts remain the primary metric for success. But in a year when the biggest big budget VFX monster was a hit precisely because of its core practical effects (Project Hail Mary), low-budget young filmmakers emerged on the strength of original storytelling (Backrooms, Obsession), singular voices found audiences the old fashioned way – by people telling their friends to “go see it” (Dear You) – and with The Odyssey (no way that’s not a massive hit) and Dune: Part Three on the way, both helmed by tactile, old school directors with an almost rebellious devotion to real filmmaking, an entirely unnecessary eyesore like Moana could fall flat, particularly when the vibrant, lush original is sitting right there. Let’s see if audiences have had enough of the dreck.