Sometimes, in my high school Spanish class, when the teacher was especially tired, he would turn on an American movie dubbed in Spanish — usually an animated Disney movie. As much as I normally loved watching movies when I was supposed to be learning, I hated those days in Spanish class. I found it incredibly frustrating to watch a movie I knew well, like “The Lion King” or “The Little Mermaid,” in a language I did not understand — despite four semesters of Spanish — spoken in voices I did not recognize. It was like a funhouse mirror version of the movies in a way I found genuinely upsetting. It always grated on my brain.
It’s exactly how I felt watching “Moana 2″ in the theater with my three children, ages 12, 9 and 5. It’s how they felt, too, judging by their responses. My 5-year-old was only interested in talking about the popcorn after seeing the movie. My 9-year-old was bored, and my 12-year-old said, “It wasn’t as good as the first one.”
Granted, she was 6 when we saw the first “Moana,” which is hardly an age for rigorous cinema criticism, but I agree. “Moana 2″ is a far cry from “Moana,” which was a movie she, and I, liked a whole lot.
Since seeing “Moana” in 2016, I’ve listened to the soundtrack no fewer than 5,000 times, which I would like to blame on my children. But I have listened to it without them on more than one occasion. The song “How Far I’ll Go” moves me to tears to this day, and I’ve had “You’re Welcome” stuck in my head for eight years. I even have the bridge, featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s rap, memorized. The line “Your granny lied,” sung by Jemaine Clement in “Shiny,” makes me laugh out loud.
By comparison, I cannot remember a single song from “Moana 2,” which I saw this week. Not even a single melody. Each track had “we wrote this in a hurry” energy.
“Moana 2″ felt like watching “Moana” dubbed in Spanish because it looked like “Moana” and sounded like “Moana,” only worse. It grated on my brain.
When I learned that the project originally began as a Disney+ series, a lot of what I had just watched made more sense and explained why the movie felt like a bunch of different plots, characters and ideas thrown together without a clear through line, as though there were clips taken from 20 different episodes. Namely, characters that appeared without any context, a mismatch of American, Australian and New Zealand accents, and those forgettable songs that, if I had to guess, were only added after the series was turned into a film.
Unlike the Disney sequels of yore — cough, “The Return of Jafar” — “Moana 2″ visually looks great. The animation of the water, in particular, is remarkable, and the movie is bright and visually engaging enough to keep even the rowdiest child sitting for the 1 hour and 40 minutes. The killer coconuts were especially fun to watch, and the ocean creatures delivered the best visual gags.
But the movie as a vehicle for a story makes no sense. Not just because I was right and the animal fluency hierarchy is wildly confusing — Mua the pig cannot speak but somehow understands and reacts to multiple jokes about pork and bacon — but also because the script is all over the place.
Moana and her canoe crew need to find people from other islands for reasons that are unclear, and they need to find one certain cursed island for reasons that are also unclear. Maui, the demigod, is in a cave fighting a bat lady, for reasons that … you guessed it … are unclear. I was never sure why any of the characters were doing what they were doing, and if you paid me to summarize the plot I would lose out on your money because I am unable to even begin trying.
There’s a villain whose face we don’t see until partway through the credits. The mid-credit villain sequence sets up a third “Moana” movie, which seems ill-advised given how much of a mess this second film was. On the other hand, “Moana 2″ made $386 million during its opening week and set the record for the biggest global opening for an animated movie. Ever.
So maybe quality doesn’t matter. Maybe Disney knows that if they release a sequel to one of their beloved original animated motion pictures, parents will pay to take their children. And maybe a guaranteed cash cow is all they care about. But I wish that in the future Disney would do me the favor of creating stories that make sense and songs that are pleasing, lest I’m left unwillingly revisiting my Spanish class movie days.
“Moana 2″ is rated PG for action/peril.