REVIEW:
We are living in a strange time with Disney live action remake movies, a term that didn’t even exist before 2010. In that year, Disney made a Tim Burton directed live action Alice in Wonderland film that did really well. This sent a ripple effect through the next two decades, of Disney turning nearly all of their animated properties into live action movies. And the truth is, most of them weren’t very good. The reason was simple. They changed things. In order to justify making the movie “again,” the people behind these films seemed to feel that they needed to make changes, so that they could act like they were “improving,” on the original. Of course, none of this was true. They didn’t need to make changes, and they certainly weren’t going to improve on the original films, which were so beloved. But they wanted their remakes to actually feel a little different. To do this, the types of changes they made included such things as adding scenes, adding songs, taking out scenes, and taking out songs. As it happened, these were exactly the wrong things to be doing.
While originality and creativity are the backbones of great movies, and nobody wants to see the same old thing again and again, in the case of a live action remake, there is an exception. The new Moana live action remake proves that. It might be the first movie of its kind that actually gets it right, and it does that by making almost no changes at all. To understand why, one has to understand the perspective of the audience. Anyone going to see this is not only familiar with the original film, but is most likely a big fan of it. We don’t want to see them try and make it “better.” We just want to see the version we know and love, now told with live action.
And that’a exactly what the new live action Moana film does. Never before has a live action movie been so faithful to the original source material. This movie is so faithful, in fact, that some of the first couple of songs make the audience wonder if they are actually using the exact music and audio from the original film. They aren’t, of course, but the closeness is pretty amazing. And the truth is, that’s what we want. We want to hear the beats and voices and sounds we are familiar with. Not another version of the songs, now being sung in a different way.
And so Moana happens to be one of the better live action Disney films yet. It’s the first one I can remember that truly feels like the original movie, brought to life. The story is the same, the songs are the same, and boy does it all look fantastic.Now it helps that the original Moana film had a great story, filled with cool challenges, such as the Kagamura, a tribe of coconut wearing shorties who swing around their giant ships on ropes and use spears and darts to attack. There’s also Tamatoa, the giant snail who collects shiny things. All of this was in the original film, and it’s here too, but this movie deserves a lot of credit for not leaving any of these cool characters or features out. Now that might seem like a no-brainer, to keep these parts in the movie, but believe it or not, Disney has blundered this sort of thing in the past (The Little Mermaid, Chef chasing Sebastian around the kitchen, while singing, “Le Pouison,” easily one of the funniest scenes in the animated film that was left out of the live action remake.)
So, yes, the live action Moana is very very similar to the animated version. And yes, that turns out to be a very good thing. It feels like seeing the movie we love again,” only in a way that looks uniquely different, simply because of the change from animated to live action. In terms of casting, it’s great that they got the Rock back for this one as Maui, instead of replacing him with a younger actor. The live action Aladdin was good, for example, but there’s no question Will Smith’s genie left us nostalgic for Robin Williams’ version. Here, since the Rock voiced the character in both films, there’s no uneasy feelings about the sounds in the live action film not matching the sound sin the animated. It’s just one more feature that works about this movie. This is the way you make a live action remake film. Finally!