THE STORY – Prompted by a summons from the ocean, Moana departs her home island of Motunui for the first time and travels past its barrier reef. Accompanied by the demigod Maui, she undertakes a voyage aimed at recovering the well-being of her community.
THE CAST – Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams & Jemaine Clement
THE TEAM – Thomas Kail (Director), Jared Bush & Dana Ledoux Miller (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes
When it comes to Walt Disney Pictures’ live-action remakes of its animated features, it’s incredibly tempting to copy and paste large sections of previous reviews and reuse them, as much because of their quality as because of the fact that the problems that face them remain the same: Disney has put the directors of these films in an impossible position. Take the role of adaptation seriously, and you risk changing the property so much that people get upset that it doesn’t resemble the original they loved, but remain too faithful, and you beg the question: why even make the film at all? The answer to that question, of course, is money, which ensures that these will keep coming with as much regularity as possible until they run out of films to remake, as long as audiences keep showing up regardless of the films’ quality. It’s easy to be cynical about these films because of that, but that doesn’t mean that the people who actually made them were coming from a cynical place. That much, at least, seems to be true of the team behind “Moana,” the latest of these films to be regurgitated to the moviegoing public. The film is made with an obvious love for the characters and culture of the original film, to the point of reverence. More than any of the others, this live-action remake actually feels like a true remake of the animated original in live action. There are enough additions that you can’t really call it a shot-for-shot remake, but it comes awfully close. This isn’t necessarily a problem; a consistent issue with these films has been adding material that only makes them longer, with new songs and subplots that detract from what made the originals so beloved. But while some of the others have at least attempted to carve out a personality separate from the originals, director Thomas Kail has decided to stay as faithful as possible to the originals.
Luckily for him, “Moana” is one of the most purely enjoyable films Disney has released in the past two decades, with buoyant music, vibrant colors, memorable characters, and a classic coming-of-age adventure story: When her island home starts dying, chieftain’s daughter Moana (Catherine Laga’aia) bravely ventures out beyond the reef surrounding their island against her father’s wishes to find the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) and force him to return the heart of island goddess Te Fiti, which he stole years ago. According to legend, once Te Fiti’s heart is returned, she will come back to life, and so will the flora and fauna of Moana’s island. To accomplish this task, Moana and Maui need to overcome their differences and learn important lessons about themselves. And also get past a tribe of angry coconuts, a giant treasure-hoarding crab, and a volcanic demon.
The episodic structure of “Moana” would seem to make it a prime candidate for a wholesale rewrite, but screenwriters Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller’s instinct to keep it mostly intact makes sense. The story’s emotional beats are perfectly placed for maximum impact, and it tackles some heady (for kids) themes with enough simplicity that everyone can understand without ever needing to dumb them down. Making relatively minor changes in tone to the original to account for the added danger we perceive in a live-action film versus an animated film feels appropriate, even smart: The original “Moana” was released ten years ago, meaning that the kids who grew up with it are now in their teens and early twenties, and in need of something a bit more mature. Kail largely shies away from that, though, staging and shooting each scene as close to the original as possible, with some wider shots to emphasize… what exactly is unclear. The film doesn’t look washed out, but it also doesn’t have the same bright colors as the original, and the green-screen work is painfully obvious, so emphasizing the visuals in this way feels like a miscalculated attempt to make the film feel more cinematic in live action.
But if that’s the case, then why does Kail copy so many comic animated bits from the original? Watching the women of Moana’s village put lei after lei on top of her, ultimately covering her completely, is a fun gag to watch in animation, but it doesn’t have the same effect when it’s real people and real flowers. Similarly, why use a CGI pig for Moana’s pet Pua when it doesn’t have to do anything more complicated than run to Moana, other than to serve as a blind fidelity to the original film? That said, some things do work better here than one might have expected. The Kakamora look surprisingly good, and even feel genuinely menacing in a way their animated counterparts never did (even if they’re still mostly there for laughs). Some of the water effects look pretty good, too, as the ocean pulls itself into shapes to interact with Moana, and, as in the original, Maui’s living tattoos nearly steal the show. None of these things is new, though, which raises the question: why watch this film at all when the original exists? So many scenes are simply copied exactly from the original, most notably the sequence featuring giant crab Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement, reprising his role from the original), which looks and sounds so confoundingly close to the original that seeing the human actors comes as a bit of a shock.
“Moana” has such good bones, though, that it’s hard to complain about any of this. What’s not so hard to complain about is Johnson’s performance as Maui. The beefed-up muscle suit and wig he wears look ridiculous, and the erstwhile Rock looks like he knows it. After so fully committing to his performance in “The Smashing Machine,” it’s painful to see Johnson look so disengaged here. He looks like he’s just going through the motions, coasting on his considerable charisma while giving exactly the same vocal performance he gave in 2016. It’s too bad he’s such a wooden scene partner, because Laga’aia is trying her hardest to give a performance worthy of the character. After a rough, stilted first scene, she settles into the role quite nicely, with an engaging screen presence to match her beautiful singing voice. She grows with the character into a fully self-confident young woman by the film’s end, not quite a movie star yet, but with all the tools to go as far as she wants.
“Moana“ marks an interesting inflection point for Disney. With only ten years between the original and this film, it’s the closest a live-action remake has come after the original. This means that the film doesn’t have to lean as heavily on nostalgia for the original as other films of its ilk do. The original is still incredibly fresh in audiences’ minds, and that seems to have sapped the creative team of their nerves when it should have emboldened them. The slavish devotion to the original, even casting two significant roles with the same actors, keeps this “Moana“ from being all it could have been. However, when the original is as good as “Moana“ is, why change it? For all that’s uninspired about this “Moana,“ at least it’s not bad.
