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A review of Disney’s live-action adaptation, and what it means to watch it as a father.
It’s been over a week by now and everyone’s probably seen the movie already right?
Plus, there’s really nothing new to spoil about the ive-action Moana film because they basically just made the animation into real people.
So… let’s start with the moment early in Moana, both the 2016 animated version and this year’s live-action reimagining, where the ocean reaches out to a toddler on the beach and it seems to recognize something in her that she doesn’t yet recognize in herself.
That moment, small and quiet and full of wonder, is what the entire story is really about.
It’s about a child who is seen, truly seen, before she knows who she is.
And everything that follows is her finding her way back to that recognition.
I watched this film with my family at SM Lanang. My son’s eyes didn’t leave the screen once.
And somewhere between Maui’s entrance and the final sail home, I remembered why this story got to us the first time.
The Story, Then and Now
For those coming in fresh, Moana follows the daughter of a Polynesian island chief who is chosen by the ocean to sail beyond the reef, find the demigod Maui, and return the stolen heart of the goddess Te Fiti before darkness consumes her island and everyone she loves.
The 2026 live-action version, directed by Thomas Kail and written by Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller, follows this story with remarkable faithfulness.
Almost beat for beat.
Every major scene, every song, every emotional turning point lands in roughly the same place it did a decade ago.
Critics have not been kind about this.
The film currently sits at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers calling it a shot-for-shot facsimile that offers no artistic reason to exist. I understand that argument.
From a purely cinematic standpoint, if you’ve seen the original, you’ve essentially seen this.
But here’s my honest counterpoint: familiarity, when it comes to stories about family and belonging, is not always a flaw.
Sometimes it’s the whole point.
The Nuclear Family: Tui, Sina, and What Parents Fear
At the center of Moana’s world is a family that loves her completely and limits her anyway.
Chief Tui doesn’t forbid Moana from the ocean because he doesn’t believe in her.
He forbids her because he lost someone to it once, and love, especially parental love, has a way of calcifying into protection long after the original danger has passed.
He is a good father making an understandable mistake.
He is building a wall around his daughter and calling it safety.
Sina, her mother, is quieter about it. She sees what Moana is. She doesn’t quite stop her. She just loves her in the space between what her husband forbids and what her daughter needs.
This is a family I recognize.
Not because mine looks exactly like it, but because the tension between protecting your child and allowing them to become who they are… that’s a tension every parent sits with.
Someday my son will want to sail beyond the reef in whatever form that takes.
My job, like Tui’s, will be to figure out when holding on becomes holding back.
The Found Family: Moana, Maui, and One Very Useless Rooster
If the nuclear family is what Moana comes from, her found family on the ocean is what shapes who she becomes.
Maui is not an easy companion.
He is arrogant, wounded, and deeply afraid under all the bravado.
His backstory, abandoned as an infant by his human parents, earning his place through gifts rather than being loved for who he was, explains almost everything about him. He performs heroism because he was never simply held or hugged as a baby.
Moana eventually sees through it. And in seeing him, she gives him something his tattoos and his hook never could.
Dwayne Johnson reprises the role with a commitment that deserves more credit than critics gave it.
He emulates the energy of his own voice performance in the animated film, which is a strange thing to ask of any actor, and he mostly pulls it off.
The body, the swagger, the comedic timing… it’s Maui.
Not 100% but it is Maui… I’d just like for him to be rounder…. Like the animated character.
I guess I want my Maui a little chubbier.
And ugh… that wig really looked a bit off.
Catherine Laga’aia as Moana has the movement, the grace, the emotional transparency the role demands. In a film where almost everything else is familiar, she makes Moana feel new again.
And then there’s Heihei.
Still completely useless.
Still somehow essential.
Every family has one.
The Larger Family: Motunui and the People She Sails For
What the 2026 version captures well, perhaps even better than the original in some moments, is the weight of community on Moana’s shoulders. She isn’t sailing for herself. She is sailing for her island, her ancestors, her people, a lineage of voyagers who stopped being voyagers out of fear.
The ancestors are always present in this story.
Gramma Tala, who dies early and returns as spirit and stingray, is the bridge between them. She is the one who gives Moana permission that her father wouldn’t. That’s the kind of love only a grandmother can give.
What It Means Ten Years Later
The animated Moana came out in 2016.
My son wasn’t born yet.
I watched it eventually, when he started wanting to watch some cartoons. It became one of the films we bonded over as a family. That and The Greatest Showman.
We listen to the soundtrack to Moana whenever we’re on the road.
Sometimes we rewatch it on a lazy Sunday.
“How Far I’ll Go” is a song we hum without meaning to.
Watching the live-action version with Lyle beside me, knowing that in some parallel version of this story I am Chief Tui watching my child be called by something bigger than what I can protect him from… it feels very differen now.
The ocean chose Moana.
Not because she was perfect.
Because she was ready, even before she knew it.
That’s what good stories about family do.
They remind you that the people you love were never only yours to keep.
Sometimes the ocean calls.
And the best thing you can do is teach them how to sail.
Special thanks to Disney Studios Philippines for the invitation to the advance screening. Moana is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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