‘Moana’ Review: Disney’s Ultra-Faithful Remake Is Deathly Afraid to Explore Unfamiliar Waters

Faithful to a fault, Thomas Kail's retelling of the 2016 animated hit is a competent but superfluous addition to the Disney live-action remake pantheon.

Since Disney live-action remakes became a consistent enterprise (around the release of Kenneth Branagh’s actually pretty good “Cinderella” in 2015), audience sentiment has more or less held that the more faithful these films are as recreations of their originals, the better. Whenever a remake has strayed too far from the childhood memories people hold of the animated classics, the changes prompt social media blowback of varying degrees of validity, ranging from righteous anger over misguided alterations (a “Lilo & Stitch” where Nani gives up Lilo to social services), pedantic annoyance over a valid creative choice (“Mulan” choosing to nix the original songs), or outright stupidity (the scores of trolls who thought “The Little Mermaid” couldn’t conceivably star a Black woman). When last year’s admittedly insipid “Snow White” chose to tell a relatively original take on the classic fairy tale with the dressings of Walt Disney‘s inaugural film, it became one of their biggest bombs.

If anything, though, the core issue with the churning remake machine has always been Disney’s reluctance to take risks with their material. Almost every remake from the company that’s come out in the 10-plus years since “Cinderella” has been loyal to a fault to the 2D worlds Walt Disney Animation Studios first created, attempting to retell the beats of the original scripts and translate the fantastical characters of animation to live-action storytelling. The results have invariably been uglier, longer, inferior versions of films people already know and love, which provide a cheap rush of nostalgia but don’t offer any surprises or challenges.

“Moana,” the latest Disney remake, isn’t close to the worst of these projects, but it may be the most superfluous. That’s not just because the original “Moana” was released only 10 years ago, and has remained culturally omnipresent as a staple streaming watch for families, or that a sequel was released just two years ago. This is, undoubtedly, the most faithful any Disney remake has ever been, hitting almost every single beat from the original with such mathematical accuracy that it’s really not an exaggeration to call it a shot-for-shot facsimile on par with Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho.”

The bones of the original “Moana” are strong enough that this remake is perfectly watchable. But it registers as incongruous that this story, all about exploring the unknown, plays things so painfully safe.

To summarize the plot of the new “Moana” is to essentially just recap the original movie, a nimbly paced action-adventure directed by longtime Disney vets John Musker and Ron Clements of “Aladdin” fame. Set in an ancient Polynesian-inspired world of endless oceans dotted by tiny islands, it told a coming-of-age journey for its titular heroine, the heir to the title of chief of the island of Motunui, as she sets out onto the open waters on an adventure to restore the heart of the nature goddess Te Fiti and save her village in the process. That the film became such a major success was unsurprising: its buoyant seafaring adventure premise was immediately appealing, its central protagonist was both relatable and an inspiring action hero, and its original songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foaʻi, and Mark Mancina were some of the best bangers Disney had offered up in years.

The remake serves as the directorial feature debut of Thomas Kail, best known for directing Miranda’s breakout hit stage musical “Hamilton.” Otherwise, much of the creative DNA behind the original film remains intact: the screenplay is credited to the original screenwriter Jared Bush, along with Dana Ledoux Miller, and Mancina and Miranda both return to compose the score and songs. Most notably, and most heavily marketed, Dwayne Johnson reprises his role as Maui, the arrogant demigod who reluctantly aids Moana (played in the remake by Catherine Laga’aia) in her quest, after embodying the part with delightful comic gusto as a voice actor.

The lack of significant new creative blood involved in the project is evident from the opening scene to the credits. To name the changes made in the jump from animated “Moana” to live-action “Moana” is to pick apart specific lines, quick visual gags, shots that stray marginally from the storyboards of the original. Otherwise, Kail sticks closely to the template established for him, recreating every scene and sequence from the first movie with ruthless fidelity and adding essentially no departures of any significance.

All of the most iconic images from the first movie — a young Moana interacting with an ocean that parts to greet her as a friend, the heroine, older and wiser, gazing out onto the horizon wistfully from her docked raft — are meticulously redone. CGI faithfully recaptures the look of the non-human characters, from amusingly dumb chicken sidekick HeiHei to gigantic fire god Te Kā, and the enchanting island environments. The songs from the original are all back and arranged identically, with the obligatory new song relegated to the end credits.

The result is a film that plunges itself into a strange uncanny valley: it’s so indebted to the original that watching it feels numbing, offering nothing that the original didn’t provide in 2016. Its strict stick-to-the-script approach to adaptation, if anything, just causes the mind to wander and notice the flaws that were already there in the first place: you might start to wonder, say, if Maui and Moana’s relationship could have used a bit more material for their bonding to hold more weight, or if the final battle could have used a bit more action to fully deliver.

The entire Disney remake enterprise is seemingly founded on the idea that animation is merely a blueprint for live-action film, and the originals are irrelevant now that technology has made it possible to recreate these worlds through CG and green screen. That philosophy has resulted in many extremely ugly films, and “Moana,” to its credit, is not the worst offender in this regard. The cinematography from Oscar Faura is generally crisp, bright, and clear, with special effects that are largely impressive, bar some occasionally obvious green screen sea backdrops and a particularly howl-worthy ghost effect unfortunately used for the film’s emotional climax.

But the original “Moana” remains one of Disney’s most gorgeous CG animated films, and the live-action version can only occasionally recapture that beauty. The costuming, which decks its cast in traditional Polynesian attire, nails the transition between media, but the real humans of the film clash against the cartoonish designs of Hei Hei or the giant crab Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement). All the most gasp-inspiring moments of visual awe — such as Moana soaring across the sea as a manta ray spirit swims underneath her — are just a little stronger, a little bolder and brighter, in their original art form. Tellingly, the most inspired visual moment, Johnson’s big solo number “You’re Welcome,” is the one with its foot most firmly planted in the animated world, incorporating 2D traditional mural paintings to create what amounts to a psychedelic Busby Berkeley number.

Johnson is also an element of “Moana” that maybe should have been left to animation. The “Fast & the Furious” star gave one of his best performances in the original film, his boisterous voice acting complemented by character animation that turned Maui into a lovably egotistical, expressive foil to the heroine. Donning a ridiculously Fabio-esque wig, he offers a significantly more muted performance in live action, filled with the smirks and winks he typically brings to his action roles.

Opposite him, Laga’aia is perfectly charming as Moana, but it’s hard to shake the sense that she was cast in part because she sounds a lot like original voice actor Auliʻi Cravalho, performing the centerpiece “I Want” song “How Far I’ll Go” with near-identical pitch and cadence. Cravalho, from her breakout moment in “Moana,” was able to forge a successful live-action acting career; it’s harder to picture Laga’aia, who is heavily constrained by needing to deliver a performance in the same narrow window of earnest responsibility and wide-eyed wonder Cravalho first established, managing the same.

The original “Moana” was released both right as the modern wave of Disney live-action remakes began in earnest and as the capstone of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ last major creative and commercial peak, an era beginning roughly with “The Princess and the Frog” or “Tangled” where the studio released movies like “Frozen” and “Zootopia” to critical acclaim and healthy box office numbers. Since then, the odd “Encanto” aside, Disney has struggled to launch their next big animated franchise, and has largely alternated between nonstarters like “Wish” or “Strange World” and follow ups to their recent hits that proved to be of largely diminishing returns.

“Moana 2” was one such sequel, a retrofitted Disney+ TV series that proved shockingly insubstantial and minor when played out on the big screen. The live-action “Moana” just further highlights that, for all the promise the original film’s ending had for further trials and tribulations for its characters, Disney doesn’t quite know what to actually do with this franchise, and how to expand meaningfully on its themes of duty, legacy, and wanderlust. With a third animated film in development, “Moana” the IP isn’t disappearing anytime soon, but whether it can ever sail into new and interesting waters the original didn’t thoroughly chart is a question that remains unanswered.

Grade: C

Disney will release “Moana” in theaters on Friday, July 10.

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