Moana (2026) - Movie Review

I’ll give Disney this much: they’ve turned redundancy into a business model.

The studio has a few favorite tricks at this point. One is to take something that probably should have been a streaming series, recut it, and sell it as a theatrical event. The other is even more familiar: grab a beloved animated movie off the shelf, drape it in expensive CGI, call it live-action, and wait for the box office to do the rest.

So here we are with Moana.

And yes, this is exactly what you think it is.

This 2026 remake is not some bold reinterpretation of the 2016 animated film. It is not a fresh angle. It is not a deeper excavation of the story. It is mostly the same movie, only now it has real actors standing in front of so much digital scenery that calling it “live-action” feels like a legal technicality.

That’s the first problem. The second problem is worse: when you make the same movie again, you invite a direct comparison every second it’s on screen. And this version loses that comparison constantly.

It is the same movie, and that’s not a compliment

I’m going to assume you already know the basic story, because Disney certainly assumed you did. Moana goes on a hero’s journey, teams up with Maui, and heads into a familiar adventure built around self-discovery, courage, and restoring balance. If you’ve seen the animated film, you already know the beats. This remake follows them so closely that half the time it feels less like a retelling and more like a traced drawing.

That creates a weird no-win situation Disney keeps walking into.

If they change too much, fans complain that the studio ruined a classic. If they barely change anything, people ask why they paid theater prices to watch a weaker copy of a movie they probably already own. The obvious solution would be to stop remaking every animated hit that still has a pulse and go make something original with actual imagination behind it. Wild concept, I know.

Instead, Moana chooses the safest possible road, then somehow still makes the ride bumpier.

This version runs about ten minutes longer than the animated film, and somehow feels half an hour longer. That’s usually a bad sign. The scenes are there. The lines are there. The structure is there. But the energy is off. The pacing sags. Moments that used to glide now clunk into place.

You can feel the movie trying to recreate emotional highs instead of earning them.

The little things are where it falls apart

That’s what really stuck with me. Not one giant disaster. Not one catastrophic decision. Just a long chain of smaller misses.

There are moments of heart here that still sort of work, mostly because the bones of the original story are strong. I felt flickers of the old emotion in a few scenes. But I was feeling the memory of the animated version more than the force of what was happening in front of me. That is not the same thing.

The humor has a similar problem. Jokes that landed before now feel oddly flat. The lines are often identical or close to it, but the rhythm is gone. In animation, timing is everything. A pause matters. An expression matters. The exact speed of a reaction matters. In this remake, too many scenes feel like actors reciting lines instead of living inside them.

That hurts the drama too.

There’s a point in every hero’s journey where hope drops out from under the main character and the story needs to sit in that pain for a beat. The animated Moana understood that. It let scenes breathe. This one seems impatient with its own emotions. It rushes from line to line without letting a moment settle. So when it wants you to feel the low point, you understand it intellectually, but you don’t really feel it in your gut.

That’s the recurring issue here. Same material. Worse execution.

“Live-action” is doing a lot of dishonest work here

I kept putting the phrase in mental air quotes while watching this thing, because this barely feels like live-action in any meaningful sense. There is so much CGI that the whole movie often plays like an animated film with flesh-and-blood elements pasted on top.

And that matters, because Disney sells these remakes as if they’re bringing something grounded or tactile to the material. But when the environment is still heavily synthetic, when the spectacle is still largely built inside a computer, all you’ve really done is swap out one visual language for another.

The problem is the old visual language was better.

The animated Moana looked vibrant, expressive, and alive. It had snap. It had exaggeration. It had that fast, elastic energy animation can deliver when talented artists are controlling every beat. This remake tries to imitate those same flourishes, but imitation is all it is. A gag, an action beat, or a magical visual moment might still happen on paper, but it doesn’t hit the same way in practice.

Because animation was doing far more heavy lifting than these remakes ever want to admit.

The Rock problem is impossible to ignore

This movie may be the clearest example yet of how much animation can protect a performance.

Dwayne Johnson voiced Maui in the original, and he’s back here. On paper, that should help the remake. Familiar voice, familiar presence, built-in continuity. In reality, it mostly exposes the difference between a voice performance enhanced by master animators and a screen performance that has to stand on its own.

Animated Maui felt huge, expressive, and alive. He had swagger. He had comic timing. He had personality that bounced off the screen. In this version, too often, Maui just feels like The Rock in costume delivering Maui dialogue.

That’s not enough.

When animators had his voice to work with, they could shape facial expressions, body language, and movement into something larger than Johnson’s actual range. Here, without that buffer, the performance looks thinner. The character loses force. And once that happens, one of the movie’s main engines starts sputtering.

It’s not all on him, to be fair. The film as a whole feels oddly stiff. But he’s the clearest illustration of the larger problem: what seemed effortless in animation can look clumsy when you recreate it literally.

This remake exists to remind you the original still works

That might be the funniest thing about Disney’s live-action obsession. The company keeps spending fortunes to produce glossy arguments for why the animated versions were better in the first place.

Even visually, where you’d think this movie might have a chance to justify itself, it comes up short. The original had color that popped. It had wonder. It had those lush, glowing, bioluminescent flourishes that made the world feel enchanted. This version has some of that too, but diminished. Muted. Less alive.

There’s a moment near the end that should feel visually overwhelming in the best way. In the animated movie, it does. Here, it just kind of registers. It’s green. Fine. But it’s not that green. It’s not transcendent. It doesn’t stick.

That’s basically the whole review in one image.

This movie is built out of reduced-impact versions of moments that already worked better ten years ago. Or, to be exact, not even ten years ago, which makes the whole exercise feel even sillier. Disney is now remaking movies before the original audience has even aged out of childhood. If a kid saw Moana when it first came out, that kid is still young enough to just watch Moana.

And they should.

Final take

I don’t hate this movie. Hate would almost be giving it too much energy. What I mostly feel is fatigue.

There are pieces of heart still visible because the original story was solid. A few scenes still manage to stir something. But as a whole, this remake feels like a traced version of a much better drawing. It copies the outline and misses the life inside it.

If you somehow skipped the animated Moana, watch that instead. If you loved the animated Moana, this version will probably just remind you why you loved the animated Moana. Either way, Disney’s sales pitch gets weaker the longer you think about it.

Verdict: a glossy, unnecessary remake that follows the original closely enough to invite comparison and loses that comparison almost every time.

This is the cinematic version of turning in traced homework and expecting extra credit for using more expensive paper.

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