Having a two year old daughter I’ve had to watch “boana” a bunch of times now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not a good movie. It’s kind of OK. It’s mostly pretty. It’s got a few halfway decent songs. That’s about as much as can be said for it.

The first problem is that it’s not uniformly pretty. Why is it that Disney animators can’t draw adult males any more? I heard that some Polynesians were offended that Maui was drawn as an obese semi-giant-semi-dwarf, and their point is quite fair, since Maui looked bad. But this wasn’t just Maui, it was also Moana’s father. It was true of the father in Brave, too. I’m sure that somebody will say that they’re not ugly, they’re stylized. I’d consider accepting that if:

1. This was how females were drawn, too.
2. They didn’t look ugly.

Frankly, it’s probably largely laziness. Animation has gotten ever-more expensive over time with less money becoming available to it, and so it’s gotten noticeably worse over time as the animators have to come up with ways to save time and money.

I suspect it’s also partially that Disney has given up on its cartoons being for the whole family. Since they’re now primarily advertisements for dolls, backpacks, etc., there’s no point in making them enjoyable by the whole family. They’re only supposed to appeal you very young girls, and very young girls probably don’t pay much attention to father figures in movies. To most children’s story writers, parents are at best a necessary evil.

This almost makes talking about the story of Moana pointless, since it’s largely just an excuse for set pieces, but I had to watch the thing so I feel entitled to talk about it anyway. What I find most disappointing is that it’s an adventure story with no hero.

Moana is the closest thing that one finds to a hero in the story but she’s just not competent enough to be a hero. Granted, she’s a child, but that’s just the problem—the protagonist is someone who can’t be expected to be competent.

Or rather, they throw her into circumstances she’s not competent enough for. “Competence” does, after all, take an object—it only makes sense when you specify what one is competent at. They put Moana into circumstances which require a skilled adult and have her succeed either by sheer luck or outright cheating. For example, never having sailed before, Moana is able to sail a boat on the high seas. There’s no reason given for this, she just succeeds. And the wind is, for some reason, always at her back.

When she finally flips over the boat—many hours (or days?) after she should have—the ocean then just puts her where she should be. Why it didn’t do this at first is never even hinted at. You can get away with that on a wise character who has the best interests of the character at heart, but nowhere in the movie is the ocean portrayed as wise. Which reminds me—where are any of the other gods? Specifically, where is the god of the sea? This is a theoretically polytheistic story and yet the events of the story happen in a vacuum. This is just nothing like the actual mythology one gets within polytheistic cultures.

Then we get to Maui, who makes no sense and even less sense when considered as a demigod. Leaving aside the ridiculousness of doing various things for humans in order to feel wanted, he would have been celebrated. There’s a ridiculous scene where Maui admits that everything he did for humans was to try to make them love him, but it was never enough. The amount of cussing that would be require to convey how nonsensical this is would be tedious, so I’ll just omit it, but seriously, what? After Maui did the various feats that he did there would be shrines to him everywhere. Polytheists are only too willing to worship anything they thought brought them benefits and might bring them more.

Oh, and Maui was intending to imprison Moana in a cave on his Island in order to steal her boat. There will certainly be gods and demi-gods like this in polynesian mythology, but they don’t come round to doing the right thing after a pep talk. Consider how utterly gratuitous imprisoning her in a cave without food was—he could easily have just stolen her boat—at least as far as he knew at the time. He was basically just murdering her for fun. Which he did again by throwing her into the ocean. And what’s with him trying to jump off the boat—just a few minutes before, he explained that he needed the boat because he can do everything but float.

Oh, and when Moana rescued Maui from Tamatoa, she lifted him up and half carried him out of his cave. This is another example of outright cheating in order to make her competent. Moana probably weighs somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pounds. Probably less, but let’s be really generous and say 100. Maui is going to weight somewhere around 400 or 500 pounds. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that say that he’s stylized and only weighs around 300 pounds. A 100 pound teenage girl is not going to be able to lift or carry a 300 pound limp weight. Even if Maui were helping a little bit, he would just crush Moana. She’s had no real physical training and her exercise had all been running around and climbing. I’ve no doubt that she can do a lot of pullups and has great endurance, but a 300 pound weight would just crush her. It makes no sense at all that they had Moana carry Maui out of the cave. The weaker companion rescuing the stronger companion who just got beaten in combat and was soon to be killed has been done many times. The right way to do it is to have the weaker one distract the opponent (which, granted, she did) giving the hero time to retreat. When it’s done well the hero uses his remaining strength to save the weaker one too, making them an actual team. Instead, for no discernible reason, Moana picks up things she shouldn’t be able to pick up.

And I should point out that this isn’t a male-vs-female thing. The boy in Last Action Hero never carried Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And then we come to Te-Ka. Given that Te-Ka is actually Te-Fiti, her placement on a barrier island simply makes no sense. My eight year old son also noticed this. Why, when Maui steals the heart of Te-Fiti, did Te-Ka instantly arise on a barrier island? And, for that matter, why did Maui try to directly fight Te-Ka rather than just, say, turning around and going a different way?

Which then brings up the question, where did the rest of the barrier island come from? Why was there even a barrier island? With Te-Fiti gone, why was Te-Ka protecting the worthless rock where Te-Fiti used to be? And how was the rest of the barrier island formed in a ring? There’s no indication that anyone ever tried to sail to where Te-Fiti had been, so why did Te-Ka produce lava there to hard into rock? It was obviously necessary that the barrier island form a ring around where Te-Fiti had been or Moana could have just sailed around it, but there’s just no in-plot explanation for this.

For that matter, why did the writers think that the barrier island was even necessary? It would have made more sense and solved more problems if Te-Ka had arisen on the Island which Te-Fiti had been. In particular this would have solved the problem of: why didn’t Maui fly over Te-Ka? Heck, why didn’t Maui fly around Te-Ka? Moana was able to outsail Te-Ka sideways. Why would a shape-shifting trickster have full-frontal-assault as plan A?

And finally, why do girl-power movies always have to have the power involved being—not actual power—but willful stupidity? Moana decides that she’s going to return the heart on her own. (Not that it matters, but why doesn’t she ask the sea to give her the heart again? Why on earth is the pacific ocean only 30 feet deep where she is, miles away from any island?) She then—predictably—fails and is saved by Maui. So much for empowerment. Defeating a giant lava monster is not something which one mortal on a boat is going to be able to do—incidentally, someone at Disney really should have looked up the difference between sail boats and motor boats—so why did Moana decide to do it? This doesn’t make her strong, it makes her dumb. If she had tried to recruit some allies, even unwitting ones—for example, luring the kakamura in to fight Te-Ka—that would have made vastly more sense. Had she recruited the ocean to help her get past Te-Ka, that too would have made vastly more sense. Anything which could at least possibly have worked would have made vastly more sense.

Alternatively, Disney could have scaled down the lava monster so that Moana at least had a chance of defeating it herself.

It’s not that I necessarily disagree with the writer’s goals—whatever they were—the problem is that what they wrote served no possible purpose. It just didn’t hang together at all.

Incidentally, who thought it would be a good idea to have the climax of the movie in slow motion and to have Moana sing a really dumb song where a mortal reassures a goddess that being a lava monster doesn’t define her? Seriously? The tone of this is almost perfectly wrong.

Oh, and as for the ending—who on earth is going to let their toddler sit unguarded on the pontoon of a boat going at fifteen or twenty knots?