Cute as a Coconut | Moana 2 (2024) Movie Review
This girl is a star!🥥
I LiveSky film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
The other day, I stopped dead in my tracks in the grocery store (the way that, when done to or near me, triggers in me an immediate and overwhelming rage). There was a machine, a little brightly-colored, glowing kiosk with a poké ball at the top, and I briefly forgot for a moment that I’m not currently an eleven-year-old, homeschooled nerd, and was just so psyched that I forgot to continue walking.
I played the original red Game Boy game (I picked Squirtle, obviously) obsessively when it became available stateside, and I used to tour around to Toys “R” Us locations near me in both Kansas City and Houston early on Saturday mornings, before the store would open, playing the Pokémon trading card game competitively in tournaments, competing mostly against single, white dudes that were then the age I am now (and usually crushed them, because they had jobs and mortgages and bosses and old ladies, and I had the free-time and laser-focused, obsessive drive of a middle schooler).
And there, stopped in the grocery store with (rightfully) furious shoppers lunging to either side of me to avoid running me down, I had the weirdest feeling. I was jealous of the kids today that have this access to Pokemon just right there, so easy, all the time. I had to ride my bike several miles, much of it along a six-lane farm-to-market road (basically just a freeway without the safety barriers), to the nearest store that carried Pokemon TCG packs. And when I arrived there alive, which always felt like a miracle, I’d check before even catching my breath to see if there were any packs, because often, they were sold out.
How is Pokemon, something that was cool and hip and exciting and fun when I was 11 (and I’m now a million years old), somehow still a hip, young, cool thing in the year of our lord 2025 for these juvenile delinquents that dress like Marty McFly, Jr. and crowd around these glowing joy-beacons, getting their pocket monster fix so easily. I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them violently, the way they used to do to women in old films whenever they got hysterical.
It's a weird feeling. I so badly wish that I had those little kiosks in my childhood that I almost begrudge this new batch of kids this great thing. Also, I operate at a pretty-high baseline level of wanting to shake sense into teenagers (though I almost never do), so it doesn’t take all that much to get me there.
All this is to say, I loved Moana (which I saw a couple of years after it debuted, on streaming), and I loved Moana in Moana 2, and I’m jealous she wasn’t around when I was a kid.
Ordinarily, I detest quotes from producers, but EP Jared Bush also happens to be the screenwriter of both this film and the original, so he’s actually a creative (and therefore at least maybe worth hearing from).
“The first film was about Moana finding her identity,” says Bush, chief creative officer for Disney Animation. “It’s a never-ending journey. There’s still a lot that Moana needs to learn about herself. If the first film is about reconnecting with your past, this film is about Moana and her people’s future.”
They both seem like worthwhile stories. And — miraculously — this journey back into Moana’s world and life doesn’t seem trivial or inessential.
Furthermore, she does not begin this film as the old Moana, in the way cartoons and animated films often return naturally to their status quo. She bears the respect and responsibility she earned in the first film, and we rejoin her at a new place in her personal journey and growth.
It’s a rich text.
I briefly worried this movie might — like Red One — have a The Rock problem, but they pretty deftly dodged it by minimizing his role (likely reading the room regarding his decelerating career and popularity)
Fortunately, the script doesn't linger on these disconnected, uninteresting misadventures, and pretty swiftly reunites Moana and Maui, where he fades into the background. If someone put a gun to your head and told you you had to make a charming, pleasant action/adventure animated film and you have to cast The Rock — and he has to sing — you’d probably do the same.
Even the director sounds begrudging about Johnson’s involvement.
“You can’t tell Moana’s story without Maui,” says Derrick [with a depressed sigh]. “We [sarcastically] love these two characters together. They push on one another — they make each other better. And there’s so much comedy to be had with the two of them.”
I added all the emphasis suggesting it was sarcastic and begrudging, but the fact that it’s super easy to read it that way is telling, I think. But it’s not just screenwriter Bush and director Derrick. If you think about it, we all have a The Rock problem now. And frankly, we deserve it.
Auli‘i Cravalho once again voices Moana, and she does an absolutely incredible job. The Rock is also in this movie, arguably playing himself. The voice cast also includes Hualālai Chung as Moni, Rose Matafeo as Loto, David Fane as Kele, Awhimai Fraser as Matangi, Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda as Simea, Temuera Morrison as Chief Tui, Nicole Scherzinger as Sina, Rachel House as Gramma Tala, Gerald Faitala Ramsey as Tautai Vasa, and Alan Tudyk as Heihei.
Everyone gives a serviceable-or-better performance, except Johnson, and all of them are buoyed by the terrific animation. That may be a testament to the process, which Disney head of animation Kevin Webb detailed in the EPK production notes for the film.
“Since the broader style was developed for the first film, setting up the second film was an archaeological process — studying what made the visuals of ‘Moana’ so successful,” said Webb. “To me, it’s a caricatured naturalism with a big focus on sculptural appeal.”
I used to date an architect, and she’d say incomprehensible shit like that second part about buildings and ‘spaces’ and ‘moments,’ (which, like chakras, she could never definitively prove to me existed) all the time. Ignore the second part about caricatured naturalism focused on sculptural appeal (“It’s all ball bearings nowadays!”). The first part is interesting, though.
Moana 2 takes place in a bright, vibrant, colorful world of magic and wonder, and how effectively the first film represented or exhibited that sense of wonder merits some study.
There are probably an infinite number of reasons a film might resonate with someone, but one of the tried and true classics is: what's being shown on the screen is fun to look at. Especially on a theatre screen, but I’m sure even on crisp, clear home screens, every frame of this Polynesian seafaring adventure is rich, colorful, dynamic and interesting.
Here's basically my whole issue with sequels in a nutshell (if you can even call it an issue):
I think we’ve been ‘blessed’ (?) with two better-than-they-have-any-right-to-be sequels in a very short span of time (Gladiator II and Moana 2; plus, Sonic 3, which wasn’t good, but was very successful, in terms of box-office results), which obscures the inherent artistic deficit of any recycled IP.
But Disney’s gonna sequel, and with the alternative being artistic deserts like Mufasa: The Lion Who Would Be King, Moana 2 is a fresh and invigorating revelation.
In the way that needle exchanges are a good idea for us to implement, even though using needles to inject drugs intravenously in the first place is, at best, a pretty questionable individual decision, we’re going to do sequels as sure as the Sun will rise, and the world needs more Moanas and Gladiators 2 and fewer Mufasa: The Lion Kings.
Maybe the attitude espoused by Webb — of archaeological reverence for the original IP — is better than whatever inspired Mufasa, which features Timon and Pumbaa in dual, Deadpool-like roles, winking and joking to camera about seeing the Broadway Lion King show and being irritated at not featuring in the film’s actual story (they’re present only in the wholly-unnecessary frame story that solely exists to allow the presumably crowd-pleasing duo to appear in the film).
Perhaps we can think of it in terms of damage mitigation. Like, given the awful, broken, capitalist system we’ve built, obviously sequels are going to be a huge part of what we have served to us. So, given that inescapable reality — and knowing that studios and production companies are resentful of gains made by recent writers’ and actors’ strikes, and more loathe than ever to pay creatives to sit around in beanbag chairs eating Skittles and thinking up new stuff — maybe we can signal with our actual, meaningful votes (the dollars we spent at the theatres and the minutes we spend streaming on our devices) that Moana 2 is what we want more of, not the other, cynical, condescending sequels we’re being subjected to.
I mean, their relative quality is just, like, my opinion, man. And since I see movies for free, I cannot, myself, signal anything except with these, my humble words. And I’ll definitely stream it on Disney+, because it seems like a charming rewatch and something that would be pleasant to have on in the background as I write reviews or scritch cats or whatever it is I do all day.
But I’d certainly like someone, or someones, to step up and tell the world’s largest content creator (in a way it’s capable of hearing): hey, this one was good. You can make good things, and furthermore, when you do, people like them and reward you for them. Ignore the plain fact that you’d probably be rewarded regardless, and ignore the fact that dealing with the resentment from low-effort, low-quality products would definitely be the next guy’s problem, because it’s possible to just do good work, even if the 'good work’ is cravenly hewing to (perceived) low-risk investments like existing IP in an effort to avoid the hard, hard work of either creating something new or putting up with and paying the salaries of whoever is doing that hard, hard work.
I, for one, wouldn’t hate a world in which every studio, streamer and content creator on the planet slammed on the brakes, took a long, hard look at themselves, and committed to producing and releasing only what they — in their honest, human spirits and minds — feel is of good quality.
Yes, they’re hoping they’ll make astronomical amounts of money. And, to be honest, when a movie is good, I also hope it makes astronomical amounts of money. I haven’t managed to hunt down and kill all the grew-up-with-it naïveté about finances and capitalism in me, so I still cheer when one of the ones I likes gets rewarded. They deserve the success, I feel (though, in reality, none of us deserves the fallout from our economic system).
Make less, and make it better. Take time with it.
But these companies all have demanding shareholders who feel they are well within their rights to tell them to hurry up, meet a release schedule that makes fiscal sense (with its Byzantine seasonal variations in suitability for various types of fare), cast at minimum one and (preferably two-to-four) recognizable actors (so you get Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance in Nosferatu, and start filming yesterday, even if there’s virtually no chance you'll have a viable script tomorrow.
So, without acquiring and taking them private — which, at my current rate of wealth generation, you and I may never even be able to do — how do we convince these giant, soulless, profit-and-growth-generating, machine-like, hive-minds we call Corporations to do what we want?
I don’t have the answer. But money machines, if you're listening, Moana 2 was excellent, and I’d love more of that slopped into my hog-trough going forward, please.
