The new Moana arrives only ten years after the animated film, which is not enough time for the original to have become a distant memory. Its songs are still everywhere. Its characters never left Disney's cultural machinery. Many of the children seeing this version will have watched the first one days, not years, earlier.
That familiarity becomes the central problem for Thomas Kail's remake. The film is larger, more tactile, and occasionally beautiful, but it is so committed to preserving the animated version that it rarely develops a personality of its own. The story remains almost entirely intact. Moana, the daughter of Motunui's chief, feels called beyond the reef as a spreading blight threatens her island. She sets out to return the heart of Te Fiti and reluctantly joins Maui, the demigod responsible for stealing it.
Catherine Lagaʻaia gives the remake its strongest reason to exist. In her first feature role, she brings Moana an unforced warmth that the surrounding production cannot manufacture. Her performance is best in the quieter scenes, when the character's confidence is still forming and the responsibility waiting for her feels heavier than the adventure itself. During "How Far I'll Go," Lagaʻaia does not simply reproduce Auliʻi Cravalho's phrasing. She sings with less certainty and more visible nerves, which suits a young woman trying to understand why the horizon feels like an obligation.
The casting around her gives Motunui a welcome cultural specificity. Rena Owen makes Gramma Tala playful without turning her into a collection of wise sayings, and her scenes with Lagaʻaia contain the film's most convincing affection. John Tui and Frankie Adams also make Moana's parents feel more substantial than the screenplay allows. Their fear of the ocean is connected to the practical responsibility of leading an island, not merely to the needs of the plot.
Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui, now in the flesh as well as the voice. The role fits his established screen persona so closely that the transition seems obvious, but that familiarity becomes limiting. Johnson has the physical scale, comic timing, and musical confidence the character requires. He also appears aware in almost every scene that the audience has already accepted him as Maui. The performance is entertaining without ever becoming surprising.
The remake is most alive when Lagaʻaia is allowed to be a person rather than the physical recreation of an animated heroine.
Kail, best known for directing Hamilton on stage and for television, knows how to organize bodies within a musical number. The ensemble sequences on Motunui have movement, color, and a clear sense of community. Yet the camera often remains strangely obedient to the animated blueprint. Rather than discovering a new way into the songs, it records recognizable blocking against more expensive surfaces.
The ocean is the film's most successful digital creation. It has weight without losing its personality, moving between natural force and playful companion without becoming a shapeless wall of effects. Maui's living tattoos also translate better than expected. Jemaine Clement's Tamatoa remains a welcome burst of theatrical vanity, although the live-action approach turns his sequence into more of an effects showcase than a genuine interruption of the film's visual language.
Other scenes lose what animation gave them. Hei Hei's stupidity feels calculated once attached to a realistic animal. Maui's transformations become demonstrations of rendering rather than elastic visual jokes. The Kakamora chase is crowded with movement, but its darker palette and rapid cutting sacrifice the clean graphic comedy of the original. The remake has more texture and less expression.
There are places where physical production improves the world. The canoes, woven materials, costumes, and island spaces make Motunui feel inhabited. The performers appear to belong to a culture rather than a generalized fantasy village. It is frustrating that the screenplay does so little with that added reality. A more ambitious adaptation might have deepened the community Moana is leaving or reconsidered what wayfinding means when represented by real bodies and real water.
Instead, the film treats faithfulness as its primary virtue. It recreates the emotional beats, restores the hit songs, and offers younger viewers a new Moana without risking anything that might unsettle their attachment to the first one. The result is competent family entertainment with several genuinely strong performances. It is also a demonstration of how little a remake can change while still being sold as a reimagining.
Lagaʻaia deserves another voyage. She has the presence to carry a film that asks more of her. This one is at its best whenever she breaks through the careful recreation and makes Moana feel new. Too often, the movie around her is looking backward.
