Enjoyable but forgettable

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2017)

Disney has been having some very hard times in the past 2 decades with hits that are not memorable past 2 year mark. Moana has some beautiful visuals and the mythology of Maori people is interesting indeed but the movie is one of the worst cookie cutters of Disney in a while, the last one this bad was Brave and even Brave had a better sense to its clichés than Moana. The biggest problem with Moana is the lack of any actual challenge or opposition. Everything is just handed to her in the most typical Disney way possible. Do you remember Finding Dory's scene when we finally found her parents? We had been facing some fierce challenge and by the time the parents were shown many believed that the moral of this story is to try hard to achieve the dreams but not linger in the past and then she wad rewarded for her hard work by being reunited with the parents. Here there is literally no reason to feel anything for Moana and Maoi was the one that I found more memorable although still pretty simple and at the end very forgettable. The songs also were bad, it felt like watching some operett written by elementary school students. The opening song wad OK and you're welcome also was a bit of fun but the rest were just uninspired deliverance of lines on a bad rhythm and bland melody. At the end "fight" where the ocean was literally helping Moana I was wondering why didn't the ocean fix the problem itself. There was literally no reason for Moana to be dragged into this whole mess. When you think of some of the best animations out this year you have Kubo and two strings, you have Zootopia and then you have this movie. If you were to look back only a few years you would see that Moana will not even stand at top 10 let alone anywhere near the top. A shame since Moana could have been much better. Disney needs to work harder on its animations. Just compare this to Mulan or Princess and the frog and you see the gap in storytelling quality is too wide