One Pivotal Missing Ingredient Keeps Moana 2 From Smooth Sailing

Making a sequel is always tricky. While people may have loved the original film enough to encourage a studio to green-light a sequel, that doesn't always mean that there's enough story to tell to merit a follow-up film. And even if there is, part of what audiences enjoy may be the specific presence of certain people behind or in front of the camera, meaning that if everyone doesn't return, there may be problems. 

Consider the coconut — er, sorry — consider "Moana 2." The highly anticipated sequel to the 2016 animated film, this latest adventure is serving as Disney's big box-office attempt this Thanksgiving, and it's all but guaranteed to clean up at the box office. With Disney Animation's last title, "Wish," stumbling right out of the gate, there's something comforting in the arrival of something more familiar, like another adventure featuring Moana of Motonui as she once again teams up with the raffish demigod Maui to travel across the sea. Enough of the key players did return for this sequel, but not all of them, and the most important missing part of the team is someone who didn't play a character in the original, nor did he serve as a key animator or director. But sometimes, the music is the message, and that's the thing: Lin-Manuel Miranda isn't the songwriter for "Moana 2," and unfortunately, it shows.

Now, because "Moana 2" is a sequel, it's not as if there aren't songs in this film. There are plenty, and most of them feel very much like the result of the film's songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear being told to create a new version of "How Far I'll Go" or "Shiny" or "You're Welcome." While that approach may make sense conceptually, it only works if the person you have writing those new songs is the same person who came up with the ones everyone loved from the first "Moana."

Barlow and Bear aren't neophytes — they recently won a Grammy for their Broadway-style album inspired by the Netflix show "Bridgerton" — but by being given the task of replicating the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, they only prove that no one can replicate Miranda's work (though it's worth pointing out that our own review from BJ Colangelo was quite satisfied with the sequel's soundtrack). This isn't a case of people not trying to do their best, which is almost more awkward than listening to songs that feel phoned in. But when Disney hired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the songs for "Moana," it felt like a modern version of when the studio brought Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman onto "The Little Mermaid," thus creating a massively beloved decade of animated films that took their cue from that songwriting pair. (It helps that the same directing team worked on both films.) So by sidestepping Miranda, only a few years after "Encanto," the studio has taken a big step back.

In truth, the problems seem to emanate from the overall story in which the songs appear. Where "Moana" had a clear plot in which its eponymous leading lady embarked on a journey across the sea to save her people from starvation, "Moana 2" feels somewhat harried in putting together its new adventure, replete with new characters. The first "Moana" ended up being basically a two-hander for most of the plot, between Moana (voiced by Auli'i Cravalho) and Maui (Dwayne Johnson), along with the wordless dumb chicken Hei Hei, dangerous coconut people, and a giant, shiny crab. This time around, Moana is joined by an eager and chatty boat builder (Rose Matafeo), a grouchy old farmer (David Fane), and a fanboy of the entire Moana/Maui mythology (Hualālai Chung), and that's before Maui even teams back up with his old friend. Once more, Moana has to venture out into the open sea, this time because she believes she's found proof of other civilizations that had once been bridged by a mystical island/waystation in the middle of the ocean, lost due to the machinations of another terrifying god. 

In the middle of the more plot-heavy and muddled storyline, you have the songs, a couple of which also can't help but recall other recent sequel songs. For instance, when Moana belts out this film's version of an "I Want"-style number, titled "Beyond," it feels less like "How Far I'll Go" and more like a tropical version of "Into the Unknown" from "Frozen II." 

But perhaps the biggest disappointment is the big Maui number, "Can I Get A Chee Hoo?" Considering how delightful and exuberant the "You're Welcome" scene is in the first film, it's no surprise that Johnson gets to belt out another song, once more visualized as if Maui and Moana are inside the visual design of the tattoos so heavily present on his large body. But where "You're Welcome" was a fast, charming, well-written, catchy number that also spoke to the vanity of Maui as a character, "Can I Get A Chee Hoo?" is more in line with a bland buck-up-your-chin halftime speech delivered by a coach to his losing team to ensure they can win the big game in the second half. And in-lyric rhymes like "Come on-a, Moana" only serve to show that what Miranda brought to the table musically is nigh impossible to duplicate.

But that's not for lack of trying. Each song in the film seems to function as the sequel version of what came before. "Get Lost," performed by Awhimai Fraser as Matangi, an enigmatic lady who can take the form of a swarm of bats, is very much an attempt to ape "Shiny," though just from the vantage point of kinda-sorta being the film's villain song. (This is only "kinda-sorta" because Matangi is less villainous than Jemaine Clement's crab from the original film.) Where "Shiny" was a deliberate riff on glam rock, "Get Lost" is just a speedy lyrical way to encourage Moana to look for new ways to find her path. Meanwhile, ensemble numbers like "We're Back" and "What Could Be Better Than This?" just can't measure up to the magic of the first film just without that one major ingredient that infused so much magic into the proceedings.

The songs in "Frozen II" are perhaps not quite as amazing as those in "Frozen," but the fact that they feel relatively of a piece makes sense: the Lopezes wrote the songs in both films, and you can tell. Even if "Into the Unknown" or "Show Yourself" aren't quite at the level of "Let It Go," they're all effectively rousing ballads belted out by one of the most talented singers to ever step behind a microphone to voice a Disney character. Cravalho is an excellent singer in her own right, and fortunately a number of the songs rely on her immense skill. But it's a strange thing to watch a new Disney animated movie and wish for the song sequences to be over. The story surrounding those songs is not quite up to snuff with its predecessor, but the songs desperately needed Miranda.

It's hard to know for sure where or how the dissonance began. Was Miranda out of the project as soon as he was contracted to work on the songs for the upcoming computer-animated prequel "Mufasa: The Lion King" due out later this year? Or was it because "Moana 2" was originally going to be a Disney+ TV series, and Miranda would've been a bit out of a streaming show's league? "Frozen II," like its upcoming sequel in 2026, was only ever meant to be a theatrically released film, so it tracks that the composers would've stayed the same. If nothing else, it's baffling that Disney ever thought that the best follow-up for "Moana" was a streaming series.

The most telling moment of "Moana 2" from a musical perspective comes at the very end. Anyone who's seen a Disney animated film with songs will be unsurprised to learn that there are brief reprises of a few of the numbers, because that's just how it works. Without going into great detail about the events leading up to the final moments of "Moana 2," it's worth noting that the film ends with yet another reprise. Specifically, it ends with a reprise of "We Know the Way," one of the underrated songs from "Moana," which coincidentally features Lin-Manuel Miranda himself as one of the lead singers. Miranda doesn't appear aurally in the reprise here, but the fact that one of his songs is the closing moment of "Moana 2," a film that otherwise can only refer to his songs, says a lot about the quality of the new songs.

It's not that this movie's not trying hard. But Lin-Manuel Miranda was the secret sauce that made "Moana" a true classic, and not having him back for the sequel was an unfortunate error.