If the marketing and engineered buzz are any indication, “Moana” looks like a film in which Disney has simply given up. Not in the sense that anyone expects it to be a box-office failure: following last year’s milquetoast “Lilo & Stitch,” there is a reasonable chance it could even become the year’s highest-grossing film. But the days when Disney launched its live-action remakes with months-long publicity campaigns — heavily promoting the celebrity voice actors sent on cushy late-night interviews — in an attempt to create a “cinematic event” appear to be over.
This film is just another day at the office. Parents and children will show up, haters will complain and the Mouse House’s shareholders will nod with satisfaction while looking over the year-end reports.
'Moana' - Trailer
(Credit: Courtesy of Forum Film)
The formula is familiar and frustrating, but it needs to be said plainly: Just like “The Little Mermaid,” “The Lion King,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast,” this is a copy-paste film. The same story, the same characters, the same songs with the same jokes built into them, the exact same costumes. It is a Broadway production recreating a beloved animated movie, only on film.
The title “live-action” is only partially accurate because alongside the filmed characters, almost everything on screen is animation in a slightly different form — digital creatures and landscapes created with Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) (Seriously, how hard is it to film an actual ocean? Why do I need to see so many computer-generated boats and waves? Doesn’t Disney have a phone number for a carpenter?).
“Moana,” very clearly, is a companion product. An attempt to get you and your children to buy four more tickets to a movie you have already seen.
Water: Illustration. From Moana'
(Photo: Courtesy of Forum Film)
And unlike the previous remakes mentioned above, it arrives with two additional drawbacks. The first is the timing, and the audacity of it. “Moana,” it should be remembered, is only a decade old. It does not even have the basic justification behind Disney remakes: “Parents who grew up with the original in the 1990s will take their kids to see what all the fuss is about, get emotional and sing along themselves.”
Disney is a nostalgia factory — and here, it simply skipped the nostalgia. The children who grew up with it are now in high school, or at most attending university. Is the plan for them to take their nieces and nephews to see it?
The second drawback is The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. First, because the Hollywood consensus is that the only reason Disney agreed to remake “Moana” — aside from money — is that the musclebound actor pushed hard for it as a way to revive his career. That is why the film entered the remake pipeline so quickly rather than, say, “Frozen,” which was a bigger hit.
And 2026’s Rock is not 2022’s Rock. He already has several box-office disappointments under his belt, has become embroiled in pointless online disputes and the formula of “put him back in the jungle in a children’s movie, it’s guaranteed to work” has missed the mark more often than it has succeeded.
The second drawback is The Rock, Dwayne Johnson
(Photo: Courtesy of Forum Film)
After listing all the warning signs, it should be noted that the 2026 “Moana” falls squarely into the category of “not terrible, considering the circumstances.”
Unlike “The Little Mermaid” and “The Lion King,” which were disasters in almost every respect, from casting to effects that made the animals and creatures look soulless with dead eyes, “Moana” at least benefits from a rare commodity in Disney remakes: human beings.
At its core, the story is about the Polynesian princess Moana (played by Australian actress Catherine Laga’aia, who is quite good) who must save her village and the ocean. She sets out on a journey across the sea to return the “heart” of the ocean goddess. But most of Moana’s important scenes are with — what do you call them? — actors. Well, there is also an annoying digital chicken.
The film appears to have been creatively taken over by the force of composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who brought his theater friend Thomas Kail into the director’s chair. Kail directed Miranda’s Broadway opus “Hamilton.”
Effects that made the animals and creatures look soulless
(Photo: Courtesy of Forum Film)
The two remind Disney of something it sometimes forgets with its remakes: At the end of the day, this is a musical. These are children’s films whose emotional and comedic peaks come through moving songs and interactions between the actors. And Kail, a first-time film director, handles that surprisingly well, even if this is not exactly “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Most importantly, “Moana” has excellent songs. Yes, the performances and staging are copied almost shot-for-shot from the original 2016 version. And yet the effect of Moana singing against the ocean waves (“How Far I’ll Go”) or dancing opposite a Dwayne Johnson who still sings slightly off-key (“You’re Welcome” — a decade was not enough time for voice lessons, Rocky?) remains intact.
Beyond that, the film benefits from the seeds planted by the original, which is not coincidentally one of Disney’s most beloved films, especially among girls.
“Moana” has always stood out positively among the Mickey Mouse Empire’s other female-led adventures, which were based on European fairy tales where the central dilemma was whom the princess would marry and under what conditions. Based on a Polynesian legend, it offers a more abstract, symbolic journey of a person coming of age through her relationship with nature, society and the gods.
(I have argued for a decade — without any evidence, your honor — that Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films, especially “Spirited Away,” had a huge influence on it.)
Moana has always stood out positively among the Mickey Mouse Empire’s other female-led adventures
(Photo: Courtesy of Forum Film)
There is also a downside, one shared by both the original and the current film: the story’s weak middle section. There is a sense that the screenwriters never fully figured out how to continue and escalate Moana’s adventure after the midpoint. But it is not a major problem. It did not truly hurt the original, and it is unlikely that the 8-year-old screenwriting experts sitting next to you will complain.
Another element that gives the film heart is that the most important relationship in “Moana” — given even more emphasis in this version — is between a girl and her grandmother. If viewed as a project celebrating the relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters, it can even become moving. That is helped by the fact that the actress playing the grandmother, Rena Owen, is excellent.
None of this matters to Disney’s executives and shareholders. It is still a copy-paste film that does not do a fraction of the work expected from a project brought to the big screen and treats its audience as walking wallets.
Given the negative buzz, there is a real chance that “Moana” could become the unfortunate film saddled with the title of “the first major box-office disappointment” (excluding “Dumbo”) in Disney’s live-action remake franchise.
But if the film is judged on its own terms, despite all the frustration over Disney’s greedy copy-paste tradition, the verdict can be: Fine, you can go, if you do not mind paying twice for the same product.
And if you do not remember the original very well — or if you really love it — there is a good chance you will still be moved.