Moana 2: Disney hit stumbles with 'sequel-itis'

Disney's animated musical "Moana" was a "medium-to-large hit" when it came out in 2016, then enjoyed an "unusually charmed" afterlife on streaming, becoming in 2023 "America's most-viewed film on any platform". Now, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph, we have the "inevitable" sequel and, happily, it's an exhilarating triumph that "absolutely romps along".

'A grand voyage'

In this film, our Polynesian heroine Moana (voiced again by Auli'i Cravalho) must find a long-lost island called Motufetu, "which has been sunk to the bottom of the ocean by an ancient curse". She's "going nowhere without her pet pig and chicken", who are as "dumbly adorable" as they were in the first film, and she also brings along three shipmates from her tribe.

The songs "put 'Wicked' to shame", and with a running time "that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature".

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I'm afraid it didn't charm me, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. "A little like 'Gladiator II'", it "suffers from sequel-itis, straining to contrive the magic of the first film by more or less replicating the story". And though the animation is "magnificent", the plot feels "humdrum".

This is, in a sense, "a film that was never meant to be, having begun life as a proposed Disney+ series", said Kevin Maher in The Times. Sadly, "you can tell": the narrative stumbles forward in "fits and starts through self-contained story bites that have little impact on the wider, regrettably flabby, arc"; and the whole thing is haunted by an "eerie corporate soullessness" that no amount of singing can dispel.