Water Disappointment: MOANA 2

There’s a telling line about two-thirds of the way into Disney’s Moana 2 in which the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) tells our disheartened heroine (Auli’i Cravalho) that he understands her pain. He sighs and says “No one likes sucking at their job.” Ugh. Such prosaic, contemporary crassness is all you need to know about a sequel that studiously replaces everything magical, warm, and clever about its predecessor with empty, cold, and slapdash effort all around. Where the first had soaring melodies and life-and-death pathos, this one has wet flatulent jokes and ghostly wisecracks and endless repetition of small-scale stakes. So dispiriting. I also wondered, half jokingly, if that line was a secret cry for help from within the writing and animating ranks of the project. Maybe they, too, could see this was a pretty terrible piece of work all around and were trying to send up a flare to let us know that, yes, we’ll think they’re sucking at their job. Simply put: this is not a movie a healthy animation studio would release to theaters. That this hastily reconfigured straight-to-streaming mini-series has fallen into multiplexes as an awkward movie-shaped thing is clearly a panic decision. (I wish it’d stayed a TV show; then I wouldn’t have seen it.) After last year’s flop 100th anniversary princess musical Wish was a critical and commercial whiff, it’s clear the studio wanted something theoretically safer, more guaranteed to win back some attention and money this year. Instead, the resulting feature made me think that, for as half-baked as Wish was, at least it was trying something with its hand-drawn/CG blend and unusual (if undercooked) plotting. Moana 2 is a new low for Disney animation. It tries nearly nothing at all and thinks we’ll eat it up anyway.

It follows up the moving and amusing original 2016 effort’s well-plotted, deeply-felt hero’s journey with catchy songs—the usual Disney mode!—by giving us exactly none of the original’s charms. Its music—without the melodies or lyrics of a Lin-Manuel Miranda or equivalent—are generic poppy nothings. Forget a lack of memorable melodies; this one doesn’t even have one memorable note. Its characters have no interesting inner journeys. Even the actual journey is a flat, predictable, one-thing-after-another trip with little at stake. Moana has to find a mythical island. Then she does. Along the way she meets some new obstacles and new characters—a crew of sailing pals, a semi-villainous demi-goddess, a few wiggly monsters—and not a single one pops with delight or interest. (One’s even a grumpy old guy who keeps complaining about the story he’s in, annoyed by the unmemorable singing, awful clunky rapping, and flat attempts at comedy. I related to him the most.) Some supporting characters just fall off the narrative entirely as if their episode is over and we need not circle back around. Its a symptom of its jumble of half-hearted subplots, abandoned gags, interrupted themes. But its thin plot and dead-end characterizations were a match for the frictionless plotting and bland animation that lacks the detail and glow that the other Disney works manage. I sat stupefied as it kept slipping under my lowering expectations.

I found my mind wandering—and stay with me, this will seem like a tangent at first, but will make sense by the end—to this year’s surprise hit video from YouTuber Jenny Nicholson: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. I couldn’t believe I actually liked it, let alone watched the whole thing. The video really shouldn’t work. Anyone with allergies to chirpy, weirdly-lit, direct-to-camera monologues of nerd-culture exegesis (complete with some cute cosplay), not to mention those who’d never want to hear about a stranger’s vacation, would be rightly suspicious, especially as this one ticks methodically toward the four-hour mark. I was skeptical. But it’s somehow improbably one of the year’s best documentaries as Nicholson, an engaging storyteller, only starts with a thorough recounting of her miserable stay at Disney World’s poorly executed, and sooner than later shuttered, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. She's comprehensive in her dissection of the attraction's lifespan and every error along the way, threading it into her actual footage of experiencing its failures in person. Her thoroughness itself becomes a great source of humor that accumulates laughs as it goes. Who’d have thought a recurring cutaway to a pole obstructing the view of a dinner show would be one of the funniest moments of the year? Each new stumble in her trip becomes not a self-pitying home video, but a new plank in the scaffolding for a larger argument about the current failures of the company at large.

Along the way she’s built up the evidence to land a bigger point about the dreary state of Disney’s modern business practices. From this one ill-conceived hotel—wrong on everything from the technology to the price to the design of the over-promised, under-delivered role-playing experience—she widens the lens to consider the increasingly consumer-unfriendly corner-cutting at the customer’s expense. It’s a picture of a company that thinks its name-recognition and family fandoms will keep people paying more for less. In her conclusion, she says “…maybe Disney's right, and they're too big to fail, and people won't like it, but they'll just keep coming back and paying more and more…and feeling worse and worse about it.” Moana 2 strikes me as a product of the same corporate thinking. Here’s something vaguely like what you loved before. It’s awful now, but Disney hopes we’ll keep paying for it. I found myself feeling sorry for the kids who’ll be seeing this for how low its opinion is of their interests and capacity. I found myself sad for the adults who’ll get their time wasted chaperoning those kids. I found myself depressed for the fine artists and storytellers at the studio who could do better if given the resources and directive. And I found myself, strangely enough, feeling disappointed for Moana. She was such a strong, interesting, lovable character that it seems insulting that this is what’s she’s been reduced to.