Colourful and pleasant but predictable and not particularly memorable

Rating: 7/10 (29 June 2017)

Once again we are told that to be happy we must follow our dreams despite the advice of our elders, which always works out well in Disney movies, but is an overly simplistic and potentially dangerous message with which to continually indoctrinate children. "Moana" is colourful but not very original entry into the Disney 'Princess' franchise (despite the self-referential declination). The sidekick chicken was amusing and, unusual for the genre, not much of a merchandising gimmick. The Rock as Maui was fine as the loud-mouth counterpoint to Moana's typical 'coming of age' girl character but neither of them brought anything new to the canon. Maui's "Your Welcome" song (both the music and the imagery) was a standout in an otherwise bland score. The parallels with "Star Wars (1976) are obvious - all of these types of stories tend to follow the 'hero-myth' trajectory, but this pair is pretty close (a youth who wants to leave, adults resisting, disaster strikes at home, an older mentor who dies and returns as a guiding spirit, a worldly, self-centred companion who flees only to heroically return in the nick of time, a surprise reveal about the nature of the 'enemy'). I'll admit that I'm the wrong gender and 50 years too old to be in the target audience for this kind of movie, but I enjoyed it enough to give it a reasonably high rating.