The Good, The Bad, and Moana
Moana 2, although not an especially bad film, is symptomatic a range of serious problems in our culture.
The art we consume, especially as children, has a huge impact on our ideas. Accordingly, a key part of thinking deeply about our values and premises is being conscious and thoughtful about the ideas we’re picking up from the art we consume. To that end, I wanted to spend a little time probing the stories and ideas of Moana (2016) and its new sequel Moana 2 to see what they can tell us about the environment of ideas that today’s children are growing up in.
I've always found Disney's animated musicals to be quite hit and miss, both in terms of enjoyment and the values they convey. The good ones, such as 1996’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, can bring children and adults alike a joyful experience that reinforces the values of heroism, friendship, kindness, and love. Others, such as 2000’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, unfortunately smuggle destructive anti-individualistic and anti-industrial ideas into what are otherwise stories with great potential.
This trend has continued, and arguably intensified, in recent years. Many contemporary Disney films are a mixture of overtly good and bad ideas, combining the heroism and independent characters that have always been typical of Disney with an increasing focus on mystical traditions and identity politics.
One example of this—and one in which I think the good outweighs the bad—is the 2016 Moana. It's the story of Moana, a girl living on a remote, isolated Pacific island 2,000 years ago. She learns that, in order to defeat a malevolent spirit and thereby solve a blight that’s destroying the island, she must revive her culture’s once-proud heritage of maritime exploration. Ignoring the protestations of her island’s fearful elders, she sets out to travel the oceans and save her civilization.
Moana is a genuinely heroic character. She is fiercely independent and consistently uses her own judgment to decide how to act. She takes risks for what she believes is right and stands up defiantly to any and all, demigods included. Moreover, she embodies the idea that we should face the unknown not only with bravery but with optimism and excitement. Her attitude to the ocean is captured excellently in the song “How Far I’ll Go,” and it sets her in firm opposition to the elders and their fear of what lies “beyond the reef.” The film’s catchy, upbeat, and quirky songs (such as the irresistible earworm “You’re Welcome”) combined with its gorgeous visual effects add to its generally positive and adventurous sense of life.
Despite these strong qualities, the film is far from perfect. Although it presents Moana as a confident and capable hero, it nonetheless falls into the trap of surrounding her with weak male characters whom she can easily outwit and outmatch. Further, because the story is based on a literal interpretation of ancient Polynesian culture, characters consistently do what, in the real world, would be completely irrational things, such as turning to their ancestors’ ghosts for advice, following signs in the stars, and treating animals like human beings (unlike in many Disney movies, these animals cannot talk). It’s fine to have a story with a fantastical premise, such as the existence of demigods and/or ghosts, but in order for children to clearly understand the difference between fantasy and reality, characters should still practice rationality and intellectual independence within the clearly established rules of that premise.
Even so, Moana is far more good than bad, and I was excited when I heard that it would be getting a sequel in 2024. Sadly, Moana 2 falls well short of its predecessor both in its entertainment value and its moral ideas. The familiar characters and stunning visuals of the first film are back, pretty much unchanged, but gone are the catchy, memorable songs that gave Moana much of its character. Only one of the sequel’s songs really stood out to me, and even that may not justify the effort of looking it up on Spotify for a second listen.
The sequel’s main problem, though, is the execution of its story. The setup is that a dark spirit has sunk a special island that once acted as the central point in a system of safe channels connecting the various islands of the Pacific to one another. As a result, the societies of the ocean have long been cut off from each other. Moana sets out to defeat the spirit, raise the island, and reconnect the peoples of the ocean.
On the surface, this is a great concept—a story all about the importance of connecting people from different places, which could explore the values of trade, travel, and cultural exchange. Unfortunately, it completely fails to cash in on that concept. The film never makes clear why Moana wants to reconnect her people to the other peoples of the ocean. She knows nothing of their cultures or of the ways in which trade and interaction with them might enrich her life and culture—in fact, trade is never even mentioned. Rather, the film conveys a vague sense that the people of the islands should be united in defiance of the spirit seeking to divide them (they will apparently die otherwise), but with no indication as to why this reconnection is a value. The clearest theme one can get from the film is that unity is better than division—which can be true—but the meaning of the story beyond that is obscure. My wife thought that the film was promoting multiculturalism, whereas I thought it was promoting trade and connectivity, but in discussing it we both agreed that the story was too vague to clearly be promoting either idea. Who knows what ideas the film’s younger viewers will come away with.
In many respects, Moana 2’s story is a rerun of the first film, a symptom of the general lack of creativity in modern Hollywood. That itself is harmful to the film’s younger viewers, who will not get the benefit of seeing their favorite stories develop in rich and interesting new directions, but will rather become accustomed to slightly adjusted repeats of the same stories time after time. Even the film’s humor often falls flat because the audience is already familiar with the oft-repeated gags involving a dumb chicken and a sentient ocean that were novel and unexpected the first time round.
Moana 2, although not an especially bad film, is symptomatic of many of the problems in our culture. It’s unoriginal, uncompelling, and morally vague, and these faults have a common cause: Writers and viewers alike are losing the ability to think in terms of fundamental ideas. That is a prerequisite for understanding the moral values and storytelling principles that make for a compelling and effective narrative. If we want to raise a generation of deep thinkers, we need to call out this lack of depth in modern cinema and instead promote stories that explore important ideas clearly and compellingly.