Moana — 90% of the way there
So, having twin 4-year-olds in the house who haven’t started school yet, don’t do day care or anything, and spend most of their time playing in the same room where I (try to) work means they (and I) see more kids shows than would probably be ideal. I’d love to be one of those “little to no screen time, you should learn stuff” parents, but … I’m just not.
The end result of this is I’ve spent years cycling through whatever their favorite shows or movies are and seeing them a hundred times apiece. I’ve seen every episode of Bluey and T.O.T.S. and Higglytown Heroes a bunch. We spent a month straight watching the Cars series, then it was the Toy Story franchise, then Up, then Inside Out.
Right now? It’s Moana. And I have some thoughts. Because this movie has some absolutely huge, enormous, amazing things in its favor, and also needed, like, two more passes through the script and storyboard to be complete.
I didn’t plan to make the same basic tweet twice, but I guess I felt strongly.
Moana might be the single prettiest movie ever. It’s on the short list. The early scene of baby Moana interacting with the ocean, when it parts and lets her explore? I legit thought I was gonna cry watching that in the theaters, and it doesn’t lose even a single thing on TV. It’s gorgeous.
The music is also wonderful. I’m no music expert, but I know that “You’re Welcome” and “Shiny” and “Where You Are” are fantastic little earworms that I’ve listened to a hundred times. I don’t believe they spent too much time on this surface-level stuff to worry about a complete story … but, like, did they?
The plot
That little header says “The plot.” Except … there isn’t one. Not so much. Moana always wants to go to sea. Okay, great, cool. Except she doesn’t go to fulfill her dreams. She goes because she literally has no choice. The island of Motunui is legitimately dying. What is her father, the chief, planning to do? Just gonna let everyone die out of “no going beyond the reef” stubbornness?
Maui has no interest in going along on her journey. Does she trick him? Convince him? Bribe him? Nope. The ocean literally won’t let him quit, and the ocean literally won’t let him get rid of her. There are no personal decisions. If a mystical force is directing your characters on their journey … I mean, great, but that doesn’t make for good storytelling.
Yes, when we get to our climax she and Maui both have to make their decisions, basically un-oceaned. Great. Cool. But (a) the ocean acted like it was going to take the Heart of Te Fiti from her and instead just dropped it straight down below, and (b) we went through an hour of movie where they had no choice.
The villains
So she gets Maui on her boat and says, “Hey, we’re doing this.” And his caution is that if she does it, she’s going to face a whole ocean of bad guys who are summoned by the Heart of Te Fiti like it’s the One Ring all after the Heart. To illustrate that, they almost immediately have to fight the Kakamora. Cool, great.
And then after the Kakamora … well, that never happens again. They have to combat Tamatoa in Lalotai, the Realm of the Monsters. And then they take on Te Ka. But neither of those happened because they were being pursued. They literally sought those villains out. There’s this huge warning of something that is going to happen, and then it just doesn’t. It’s like Chekhov said “Hey, it’s cool for their to be a gun, those are just for show.”
Speaking of the Kakamora…
This is incidental to the plot, but it illustrates what I’m talking about from the “take another pass through the script” perspective. The Kakamora attack and take Hei-Hei, with the Heart of Te Fiti in his throat/belly/somewhere (this chicken has weird anatomy). Moana climbs aboard their ship, armed only with an oar, and basically baseballs these little evil coconuts until she escapes with the chicken and the Heart.
That’s great. Fun scene. But tell me it wouldn’t have worked 300% better if — perhaps during the early “Where You Are” song montage, we hadn’t seen a little clip of young Moana playing some baseball-esque game with her little island friends where she batted coconuts around. It would have established her bona fides as an athletic little thing in that exact context, and it would have made the whole scene a great callback. Like I said, not bad, not wrong, just … not quite there.
One last thing
(This is a good time to say again that, for the vast majority, I like this movie. A lot! I just think they got, like, 80-90% of the way there and called it done.)
I don’t know what the storyboarding process was for this movie, when they got merchandising involved, who decided what on the characters. But I am 100%, absolutely, you-can’t-convince-me-otherwise sure that there was some step along the way where they expected little Pua the pig to be much more involved, maybe tagging along with Moana and Hei-Hei, maybe on the journey instead of Hei-Hei, something. Little pig dude was featured prominently in the movie art, he was her devoted little sidekick, he went on the boat the first time she tried when she crashed … and then he was just left behind until she got back.
They planned on Pua being a bigger part of the movie. Maybe it worked better that he wasn’t, I don’t know. And I don’t know when they scaled him back. But they didn’t tell the promotional folks about it, and that’s just weird.