Disney’s uplifting Polynesian adventure is a cut above Robert Zemeckis’s silly wartime caper while Oliver Stone makes a hash of whistleblower Snowden’s story
The profitable new recycling scheme that Disney has hit upon – remaking its own animated catalogue, minus the animation – is moving ahead so fast, one wonders how much time even their new cartoon efforts have got before getting expensively humanised. Perhaps a live-action Moana (Disney, PG) can be rustled up while its leading voice star, 16-year-old Auli’i Cravalho, is still suitably young. In the title role, her lively, lilting vocal presence is the most immediately winsome element of this Polynesian princess escapade – the gleamingly realised Pacific geography and sincere cultural curiosity of which give some sprightly lift to an otherwise formula-bound empowerment narrative.
In Moana herself , a bright teen explorer with a yen for what lies beyond, the film gives us a real character to root for; shame her environmentally motivated quest isn’t half as memorable, to say nothing of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s surprisingly insipid songs. But with directors John Musker and Ron Clements – veterans of The Little Mermaid, taking on their first CGI project – at the helm, there’s a sweet classicism at work here, down to the aqua-tastic animation itself.
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Source: Guardian
