dir. by Ron Clements and Don Hall
Moana, the latest animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is the film's first musical since 2013's Frozen, which gives it a very high bar to live up to. Frozen was a deserving phenomenon, containing some of Disney's absolute greatest songs and pairing them with visuals of immense beauty. While Moana never exceeds that film's audiovisual heights, it comes ever-so-close, and boasts a sharper narrative to boot, making for a truly enchanting experience.
When a Polynesian island is unable to find food due to a curse brought on by the recklessness of the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the Chieftain's daughter, Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) goes against her father's wishes and sails out into the great sea in order to find Maui and get him to fix his mistake.
Moana doesn't have a particularly complex narrative, lacking even the traditional element of a romantic subplot, and instead focusing solely on the hero's journey framework and the characters who inhabit it. Moana's desire for adventure is hardly a new trait among Disney princesses, and neither is its background in rebellion or its link to saving her kingdom, but it's her determination in the face of clear inexperience and uncertainty which makes her lovable. Although her moments of doubt usually have foregone conclusions, Cravalho's performance sells every note of emotion, and it helps that she's given some rather potent emotions to work with. Once she sets out, Moana doesn't frequently buckle under adversity, but the rare occasion on which she does has genuine weight.
Maui, meanwhile, is highly entertaining, and is perhaps the film's strongest source of comic relief. He's a supposedly heroic immortal with a massive ego, and the mythology the film builds around him (drawn from traditional Hawaiian myth) grants a better understanding of where his ego might come from. He, too, is faced with some tough decisions later in the film, and as satisfying as those are, they're no match for the utterly delightful banter between him and Moana. Disney's musicals are always defined by a charming central dynamic, but unlike Tangled or Frozen, Moana doesn't veer down the typical path of turning this into a romantic subplot, which is good, because considering the age difference between the characters it'd be more than a little uncomfortable, and it's refreshing besides. Maui's arc of deciding he does care about the humans actually goes by very quickly, as Moana wins him over through appealing to his ego and everything else is subtle and understated.
Indeed, subtle emotion is where Moana thrives, and much of this is communicated by the film's jaw-dropping visuals. The film's tropical setting gives it an inherent advantage with regards to environments, but the setting backgrounds are so organic and detailed that they appear almost akin to a painting. Action scenes and musical numbers fill the screen with moving parts, and yet they all work in absolute harmony, sometimes veering into abstraction. One scene with a giant crab grows more and more delightfully creepy as it goes on, eventually switching its bright colour palette to dark hues broken only by frightening neon patterns. When the film needs to slow down, however, the way it frames its characters against the landscapes achieves a poetry which approaches Laika's exquisite Kubo and the Two Strings, setting well-paced, heartfelt character moments against starry skies and the shifting ocean.
Just as essential in creating the film's visual warmth is the character design, and this is where the film arguably diverges the most from Disney tradition. Moana's proportions are much more realistic than the thin models seen in the studio's previous 3D musicals, and every other character follows that design trend. Seeing people who appear to actually have some meat on their bones gives them more of a resemblance to real people, in spite of the exaggerated density of characters like Maui, and this is very welcome. The water textures don't quite match the pseudo-realism seen in Pixar's short Piper, but given the art style around it, this is arguably more fitting, and the way the ocean is animated in Moana is detailed and gorgeous all the same. If anything, the ocean is a itself a character, as very early on Moana is seen interacting with it as if it's an animal. This is hardly a spoiler, as it happens in the film's cold open, and the ocean continues interacting with Moana and Maui throughout the entire running time.
However, as is the case with all of these Disney musicals, they feel compelled to add in comic relief animal companions. The only one who stays past the first act is a very silly chicken named Heihei, for whom the tone is set by him trying to eat a rock. The film tries its best to do creative things with Heihei, and it does frequently manage to wring laughs out of him, but there's really only one joke here, and it's that Heihei just isn't very bright. At times this gets annoying, and it always feels extraneous, but Moana's comedy stumbles far less often than that would imply, and I found that the also very funny Zootopia has a higher percentage of flat jokes. Still, the chameleon from Tangled remains supreme, if only for how minor of a role he plays in the movie.
Taking on the musical duties this time around is Broadway maestro Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame, and fans of that musical will be able to instantly identify his style. Every song is fun and catchy, but particularly delightful are the rare songs where he employs a full choir, as they punctuate their numbers with a certain communal bombast which really complements and underscores the main vocals. These tunes might not lend themselves to the sheer omnipresence of those from Frozen, but they're bound to stick in the mind of viewers for a good while afterwards.
Moana is a warm, welcome, and absolutely beautiful return to musicals for Disney's animation studio, taking the framework of a chosen one adventure and filling it with character, energy, and visual splendour. With its catchy songs, captivating story, and memorable characters, this would be an entertaining enough movie, but add in some of the most unspeakably gorgeous CG animation Disney has offered to date, and it becomes something much greater. By eschewing all but the basics of this sort of story, the film lets its characters, music, and visuals truly sing with few nagging reminders of the underlying formulas, and those elements make for a complete and utter delight.
9/10
+ Jaw-droppingly, awe-inspiringly beautiful.
+ Catchy, energetic songs.
+ Entertaining central character dynamic.
+ Story filled with subtle emotion.
- Follows the established blueprint of earlier Disney films.
- Comic relief isn't always successful.
Meanwhile:
The short preceding Moana is a brainless little thing titled Inner Workings, which recycles the conceit of Pixar's Inside Out to represent a very nervous man's internal organs as smiling animated characters, and frankly I found their appearance slightly unpleasant, particularly the flappy intestines. That could be my own distaste for the appearance of such organs speaking, but the short itself is also sort of inane, appearing to have an exaggerated "enjoy your life" message but on a much more modest scale, before giving up any pretense of intelligence whatsoever when it ends with the protagonist somehow turning his soul-crushing data entry job into a disco party. You're not missing anything worthwhile if you come in late.
4/10
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