Crew
Director – Thomas Kail, Screenplay – Jared Bush & Ledoux Miller, Based on the Film Moana (2016) Written by Jared Bush, Ron Clements & John Musker, Producers – Beau Flynn, Danny Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Dwayne Johnson & Lin-Manuel Miranda, Photography – Oscar Faura, Music – Mark Mancina, Songs – Opetaia Foa’I, Mark Mancina & Lin-Manuel Miranda, Visual Effects Supervisor – Bill Westenhofer, Visual Effects/Animation – Disney VFX Lab (Supervisor – Vinh Nguyen), Framestore (Supervisor – Glenn Melenhorst), Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisors – Jason Snell, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser & Kabir Verma, Animation Supervisors – Maia Kayser & Kim Ooi), UPP (Supervisor – Victor Müller, Animation Supervisor – Daniel Fotheringham), Vitality Visual Effects (Supervisor – Jiwoong Kim) & Weta FX Ltd. (Supervisors – Simon Jung & Stephen Unterfranz), Hand-Drawn Animation – Walt Disney Studios (Supervisor – Eric Goldberg), Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Production Design – John Myhre. Production Company – Seven Bucks/Flynn Pictures/5000 Broadway Productions/Disney.
Cast
Catherine Laga’aia (Moana), Dwayne Johnson (Maui), Rena Owen (Gramma Tala), John Tui (Chief Tui), Frankie Adams (Sina), Jermaine Clement (Taratoa)
Plot
On the Pacific island of Motonui, Moana grows up the daughter of the chief Tui. However, the island’s fishing supplies and crops are suffering a blight. In the surf, Moana finds a stone that she realises is the heart of goddess Te Fiti that was stolen by the demi-god Maui. Moana’s grandmother Tala shows her a cave where the canoes of her ocean-going ancestors have been hidden. Moana speaks up to ask why they cannot go beyond the reef but her father says they are better off not doing so. Moana defies this and sets out in a canoe. She comes to the island where Maui has been imprisoned for over a thousand years. Freed, he proves to be a jerk but Moana persuades him to help returning the heart of Te Fiti in order to save her people.
Moana (2016) was one of Disney’s animated films. It received popular acclaim but I was not much of a fan. A substantial part of it was the directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker and their constant insertion of glib, fourth-wall breaking humour and the other was the film’s facile approach to Pacific Island culture. That said, it was one of the studio’s hits of the 2010s, earning half-a-billion dollars worldwide. It also produced a lesser sequel with Moana 2 (2024). And then surprisingly, only a decade after the original came out, it underwent a live-action remake.
The Disney live-action remake goes back to the 1990s with a The Jungle Book (1994) and 101 Dalmatians (1996). The fad took off in a big way in the 2010s with the likes of Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), Dumbo (2019), Lady and the Tramp (2019), The Lion King (2019), Mulan (2020), Cruella (2021), Pinocchio (2022), The Little Mermaid (2023), Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), Lilo & Stitch (2025) and Snow White (2025).
This is an exacting remake – possibly the most faithful of any of the abovelisted live-action Disney remakes. It follows the original plot beat for beat even right down to replicating many of the same shots. The remake also has the novelty of being what I thought was the first occasion where someone who played the role in the animated film (Dwayne Johnson) has then gone onto to play the same character in live-action – although Google reminds me that he was beaten to this by Gerard Butler in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon (2025), while both Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee appeared but played different roles in Lilo & Stitch.
The remake is directed by Thomas Kail who comes a background as a Broadway director, having staged the hit versions of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (2005) and Hamilton (2015). (Miranda is a co-producer of the film and writes the songs, as he did for the original Moana). Kail had directed tv series such as Fosse/Verdon (2019) and episodes of Up Here (2023) and We Were the Lucky Ones (2024). Moana was his debut as a film director.
The surprise about the remake is that I actually enjoyed it more than I did the original (with qualifications). It took me a time to engage with it. I am not a fan of musicals so I twiddled my thumbs and looked at the wallpaper through most of the numbers. Nor for that matter did that Pacific Island cosplay do much either. It feels like the culture has been cleaned up and polished into some performing routine for a visiting dignitary that has nothing to do with ordinary life. After a time, I began to wonder if the islanders ever did anything other than singing and dancing. We do see them all happily at work in the fields but this comes with such a sunny excess that I didn’t realise that Te Fiti had blighted the crops until right near the end where we see the plantlife being restored. The oceans surrounding the island seem as though they have been digitally retouched to an impossible hyperreal aquamarine beauty.
On the other hand, I began to like the film a whole lot more once Moana set out on her quest. This is helped a good deal by a wonderfully fresh and lively performance from Catherine Laga’aia in the role of Moana. And okay there is Dwayne Johnson in a fake and obvious looking wig as Maui. However, I preferred Johnson here than as the animated version of Maui. Johnson seems to be doing a little more in the way of acting than he does most of the time, which is usually to play a chiselled block of wood on screen and narrow his eyes to a laser-like glare to denote anything. The sparring between he and Catherine Laga’aia works well.
In Thomas Kail’s hands the fourth-wall gags and anachronistic references seem a lot less grating and glib than they did when Musker and Clements delivered them. I am not sure whether Maui’s animate tattoos work as well in live-action or not. On the other hand, all of the other beats of the film you remember from the original are there – the world’s stupidest ever chicken, the weird Kakamora pirates, the encounters with the crab Tamatoa and the volcano god. Other live-action remakes of the last few years like Dumbo, The Lion King, Aladdin, Mulan, Pinocchio and Lilo & Stitch ended up being lookalike recreations that were missing the heart of the originals. Moana is one of these that finds that and comes out with all the exuberance of a Broadway finale.
Trailer here