Okay, sheesh. You guys are going to think I'm some movie nut at this rate. I'm really more of a books-and-video-games kind of guy, but they take a lot longer for me to get through, and my friends and family have bugged me to watch movies with them lately, so uh. Here we are.

I was planning to watch Moana eventually. I'm tragically far behind on Disney movies. I always preferred the classic, 2D-animated style, but wow, did Moana sway me a bit away from that. This movie is beyond gorgeous. The water, the plant textures, the clouds, the hair of the characters, they're all amazingly detailed and realistic. The one drawback to this is that the human and animal characters are still so stylized and cartoonish by comparison, they almost feel like they don't belong on the same screen as the backgrounds.

(Also, brief note going forward: I may get some of the spellings wrong up ahead, since I don't know any Polynesian languages. But I'm also not going to look them up, because I don't like my initial-thoughts reviews to get tinged with anything I read about the story on the internet.)

There are two aspects of the plot that I really liked. The first is that the writers remained aware of the plot's weaknesses as they went, and examined it during the movie. I'm so used to accepting the hero of any given story as the "chosen figure" that I didn't really stop to think about Moana-as-chosen-one . . . until the character Maui actually pointed out midway through that the ocean choosing Moana seemed baseless, and therefore, arbitrary. This leads to Moana having a moment of doubt, during which she is visited by her grandmother's Force ghost, who admits that perhaps making Moana go out on a dangerous mission by herself was, indeed, a bad thing for the ocean to have done. But Moana, being offered the opportunity to go back, chooses to continue all the same. And that, ultimately, becomes the real justification for the ocean's decision: it wasn't anything supernaturally or physically inherent in Moana that made her the right one for the job; it's simply the fact that she was willing to do it. Her character, not some arbitrary magic or anything about her heritage, made her the best candidate.

The second thing I liked ties a little bit into that, actually. The main "hero team" of this movie is Moana and Maui. Moana is a teenage girl who's never been on a boat before, and Maui is a hulking, strong, agile man with shape-shifting powers and a mystical, literally god-given weapon who also knows how to steer a boat and navigate at sea. On the surface of things, it certainly seems like Maui brings everything to the table, and the story lead me on to easily believe that the final conflict against the lava demon would be settled by Maui; that Moana's only real purpose was in un-stranding Maui so he could get back to the island the lava demon had taken over. But the first attempt to return the stone to the island, with Maui making a frontal assault and leaving Moana in the background fails miserably, and the second hardly goes any better, with its focus on Moana getting past the lava demon. The demon was never an enemy to be defeated or avoided, but the actual island brought to life in fury at the theft of the life-giving stone. It was never a conflict that could be solved by violence or supernatural powers in the first place, and that makes another reason Moana was "chosen." Maui's attitude and strength would never have led him to do anything but attack the lava demon, and therefore he could never understand the true situation of the island. It took a mortal who could be generous and forgiving to solve the conflict. I liked that there was clearly an effort from the writers to not give this movie a violent solution, as there's certainly enough focus on solutions-through-fighting in U.S. media as it is.

One weakness of the movie is a bit of tell-don't show. We're told in the legend at the beginning that Maui's theft of the life stone is filling the sea with monsters that preyed on boats, and that it's slowly corrupting the islands. We do see the crops and lack of fish in Moana's village, but once she gets out on the open ocean, it feels like a pretty normal ocean. Lots of non-fantasy wildlife, and no monsters, except in an underwater cave named the "cave of monsters," which I assume already had monsters in it before the rot began to spread across the ocean.

The character of Moana's father felt a bit flat, too. I understand the reasons the narrative gave for his attitude towards any of his village traveling too far from the island, but when all the fish have disappeared, and your crops are turning to dust, you have to get food from somewhere. And since he doesn't really offer another solution, shutting down Moana's idea to fish outside the reef without any discussion feels pretty ridiculous.

I really liked Heihei (sp?) the chicken. I know chickens are dumb, but they're at least good at aiming their beaks at food—painfully good, as I can testify from experience. But I still enjoyed all of Heihei's mannerisms and constantly haggard look, despite the inaccuracy there.

We seem to be good at filling in the preview area with non-spoiler things, but I'm going to keep making spoiler blocks, because it amuses me. Deal with it.
"What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!"

—doctorlit, easily impressed by good CGI