July 11, 2026 · Watch the official trailer
Animation, when done right, gives cinema a sense of artistry and fantasy that is difficult to replicate with a live-action cast. It has served as a cornerstone of family-friendly filmmaking for decades, and on occasion, the genre has produced some of the finest films of any given year.
At the forefront of animation, both through its traditional hand-drawn classics and Pixar catalog, Disney has long demonstrated an ability to create captivating musical stories that become household favorites for audiences of every generation.
Their 2016 tale of a young Pacific Island girl who sets out to save her family as a lone explorer continued the reinvigoration of Disney’s animated catalog that began several years prior with “Frozen.” Yet at the same time, the studio has increasingly limited its original storytelling by revisiting existing intellectual properties through live-action adaptations of beloved animated classics.
Director Thomas Kail, best known for directing both the Broadway production and filmed version of the musical “Hamilton,” goes above and beyond to make an overtly faithful, nearly shot-for-shot adaptation of “Moana,” complete with specific camera angles and visual compositions designed to remind grown-up audiences of their youth.
The result, however, is a thin and shallow shell of its animated predecessor as despite Kail’s best efforts, nothing in his film possesses the same vibrancy, spontaneity or playful energy that made the original “Moana” such an enduring Disney classic.
Catherine Lagaʻaia takes over for Auliʻi Cravalho, who voiced Moana in the 2016 original, and does a solid job of attempting to recapture the magic while bringing an emotional expressiveness to her face that viewers could never get from a two-dimensional drawing.
Her performance is solid throughout, yet with how closely this film seeks to replicate its predecessor, her turn will inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, be compared with Cravalho’s vocal performance, which ultimately proves stronger during the film’s musical moments.
Dwayne Johnson reprises his role as the demigod Maui, and the physicality that Johnson brings to the role seems to be front of mind throughout his performance, as he is unable to recapture the same tonal and emotional performance that made his vocal turn in the original so memorable.
For a film with largely only two live-action characters on screen, a tremendous amount of responsibility falls upon the production design and computer graphics to make “Moana” believable, and it is here where Disney’s insistence on making everything as photorealistic as possible removes some of the wonder from its animated iteration.
Although bringing the ocean to life as the mystical force that helps guide Moana on her journey works surprisingly well in this format, the Kakamora coconut creatures become comically bizarre and absurd, lacking the same sense of nostalgia and whimsical charm that Kail and Disney likely intended them to evoke.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s familiar and iconic songwriting from the original “Moana” continues here, with the Oscar-nominated “How Far I’ll Go” maintaining the same narrative and emotional through-line in the 2026 adaptation that it did a decade earlier. Johnson’s rendition of “You’re Welcome,” however, fares less successfully due to many of the same challenges he faces transitioning from a purely vocal performance to a live-action one.
There is a strong possibility that Miranda could receive another Academy Award nomination for the original song “Along the Way,” penned specifically for the live-action adaptation and performed over the end credits by Lagaʻaia, Cravalho and Johnson.
Functioning as both a symbolic passing of the torch between the two actresses to portray Moana and an affirmation of the character’s enduring legacy, the song becomes one of the few additions to Kail’s film that genuinely justifies the film’s own existence.
Where Kail’s film works, it remains true to everything that made the original “Moana” an instant Disney classic. Where it falls short, it struggles to maintain that same momentum because it so rarely contributes meaningful artistic ideas of its own.
People who have never seen the original “Moana” may still find charm in Kail’s film, though there is little that is visually or artistically compelling enough to justify the cost of a trip to the theater when audiences can instead experience nearly everything that made the original film so memorable from the comfort of their own homes.
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