A peg leg and an eyepatch

The family went to see Moana 2 on Saturday, and myself and my 5-year-old son were the only people who seemed to enjoy it very much. The line on it has been lukewarm, owing to its original conception as a Disney+ series that ended up being converted to a theatrical film, and its non-Lin-Manuel Miranda original songs this time around.

I found the film to be a lot of fun, although (extremely minor spoiler alert here) a mid-credits scene setting up a third installment of the Moana franchise makes me trepidatious (and I am very much not an anti-sequel guy, but I felt the film had wrapped up rather elegantly — although of course as is the Disney custom, there are plenty of avenues to explore for Disney Channel series of any stripe).

A big part of the reason I was so entertained by the movie (and for the record, I only found one of the songs in Moana 2 to be a stinker; the others, while not living up to those in the first film, are perfectly fine nonetheless) is that it’s a lovely little example of how to make distinct characters when you’re creating a story. Whether they’re memorable characters is somewhat up for debate, but I’ve been writing and thinking about storytelling and filmmaking for so long that I often interpret the success of a work on the efficiency and economy of how the story is told.

So why does Moana 2 succeed in efficiency and economy of storytelling?

Become a paid subscriber to learn a minor storytelling/screenwriting lesson from me via Moana 2, a movie you maybe don’t like!