REVIEW: MOANA 2

Way back in 2016, Moana's quest to return The Heart of Te Fiti ran perfectly parallel to both Moana's own sense of unrest and her community's need to return to their voyaging roots, motivations that were all intrinsic--and also very well-established in that first act. The opposing forces were also clear--not just in the presence of lava monsters or killer coconuts, but in the attitudes she faced from her overprotective father and her swaggering demigod sidekick. Her ultimate discovery, that the island she was trying to restore and the monster she had to thwart were one and the same, was likewise an organic extension of her inherent compassion and discernment.

That first film understood the basic chemistry of the adventure narrative, and how it sang when thoughtfully applied to the Disney aesthetic, so they don't really have an excuse for bungling the mixture this time around.

For a film determined to fit in as many characters as will fit on one poster, very little about this sequel was character-centric. Moana has a sailing crew this time around, for example. This motley crew possibly served some kind of purpose back when this project was conceived as a full tv series, where they no doubt each had their own specific tracks and culminating moments, but in execution they contribute less to the narrative than the screaming chicken.

Moana herself is hardly handled any better. She embarks on this mission exclusively because the ancestors sent her a spirit lightning vision telling her she had to. There's no internal motivation propelling her into the purple storm here. Neither does Moana herself really earn the revelations that enable to advance through this mission--they're just handed to her like flags on some psychedelic version of The Amazing Race.

The musical numbers were all phoned in. I'll tip my hat to Ms. Cravalho for supplying some of the most elaborate vocals in a Disney pic, but even now I only remember the tune to one of the songs, and only a handful of lyrics. Worse, I had the recurring experience of landing at the end of each number feeling like I had discovered nothing. None of the catharsis of Let it Go. None of the elation of Part of Your World.

In a way, this was kind of inescapable because here Moana has no real questions to be answered or even views to be challenged. She is taking no risks. I think the fact that she feels no real hesitancy about taking this quest is supposed to be played as Disney Princess Spunk™, but it winds up working very much to the story's detriment because there is no tension. No specific flaw in her community or herself that we're worried about her overcoming. Moana winds up becoming redundant in her own story.

There were some artistically inspired moments within the animation itself. The 4th of July fireworks might keep your eyes in the sky just long enough that you might forget the faire grounds are being held together by rubber bands.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: COYOTE VS. ACME

The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media. But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth. I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting. Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs so...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 10 Movie Theater Experiences That Changed Me

So, January 2012: Disney is rereleasing their 1991 animated masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast into theaters, and in 3D format, and I'm able to coerce a friend into seeing it with me. This was a big deal because, as with most of the Disney movies we'd call "classic," Beauty and the Beast had its day in theaters before my time, and this was an opportunity to experience the movie in its proper element, and maybe imagine what it would have been when the legendary tunes by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken graced the public for the first time. My larger circle was none-too-impressed with my choice. Didn't I know that the movie was already on DVD? That I could just watch it anytime in the comfort of my own home without having to pay for another ticket? How could I be so careless with my finances? (Incidentally, many of these same friends would pay top-dollar to see the Beauty and the Beast remake five years later on opening weekend ...) ...

"What Are Happy Endings For Anyway?" (II) - The Docks of New York

Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land . My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time , “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.” The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why...

REVIEW: Jungle Cruise

Disney has relied on branding for their box-office since Walt himself started using fairy-tales as a launching pad. Flash forward 80 years, and the branding wars have escalated not just within the Disney company, but the industry all around. Disney's Jungle Cruise walks the line between original and remix, and not just because it's adapted from a theme-park ride. This film, a pastiche of adventure flicks over the last 60 years, absorbs the best from its sources of inspiration but falls just short of congealing them into something truly groundbreaking. Tales a mythical tree of life have beckoned explorers since it bloomed into legend hundreds of years ago. This catches the interest of explorer Lily Houghton who makes it her mission to find the tree, first to distribute its gifts to the world and second to keep it from the hands of less benevolent seekers. Her success hinges on joining forces with the gruff Frank Wolff. He'll ferry Lily and her brother, McGregor, across th...

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s 'Aladdin' in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with 'Inside Out 2' and 'Zootopia 2' topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely...

Making Room for Classic Movies

Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

Finding Nemo: The Thing About Film Criticism ...

Film is a mysterious thing. It triggers emotional responses in the audience that are as surprising as they are all-encompassing. As a medium, film is capable of painting stunning vistas that feel like they could only come to life behind the silver screen, but many of the most arresting displays on film arise from scenes that are familiar, perhaps even mundanely so. It’s an artform built on rules and guidelines–young film students are probably familiar with principles like the rule of thirds or the Kuleshov effect–but someone tell me the rule that explains why a line like “We’ll always have Paris,” just levels you. There are parts of the film discussion that cannot be anticipated by a formula or a rulebook, and for that we should be grateful. Arrival (2016) But the thing about film–and especially film criticism–is that film critics are not soothsayers. Their means of divining the artis...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog