Moana 2 premiered on Nov. 21 at the Lanikuhonua cultural institute in Hawaii, and released
fully in theaters on Nov. 27, eight years after the first movie came out.

In Moana 2, Encountering many magical obstacles in the way as well as some unexpected
allies, Moana teams up with a new set of characters to go on a quest to save the day from a
new villain and curse, much like the driving reason for Moana’s quest in the first movie
where it threatened the survival of her people.

Unfortunately, these new characters weren’t really all that great as people thought they
would be. To me they seemed more like background characters that you see once and
forget about, in fact, I think that’s what they are, I can only remember their base personality
traits, not even their names.

They didn’t seem fleshed out enough, like they were just written on the spot to check off the
to-do list. Because of this apparent lack of planning, emotional scenes with these
characters that should have had a lot of weight and importance to them were boring and
lacked any lasting effect on me.

Another thing that disappointed me while watching was the music. I believe that one
reason why everyone was raving about the music in the first movie—perhaps something
that made it so popular in the first place—was because of Lin-Manuel Miranda. He wrote a
lot of the music and his signature style made it extremely catchy and memorable. However,
Miranda didn’t work on the music for this movie. Mark Macina, someone who also
composed a bit of the music for the first movie and Broadway’s production of The Lion King,
took over.

Although Macina helped with the first movie, his attempts at replicating it for the sequel
was unfortunately not enough. I walked out of the theater only really remembering one of
the songs out of the whole movie.

I think that the only thing I really liked was the animation.

Although it blew me away, the quality of the animation didn’t really improve since the last
movie. The bright vibrant colors and breathtaking seascapes mesmerized me and made it
almost worthwhile.

Saying that, I recommend to just save yourself 20 bucks and wait until it comes to
streaming.