If you want a quick explanation of why Moana 2 is on target to gross more than a billion dollars worldwide (it’s already made $400m in less than a week), you need only to look back to 2023, when the original Moana – a seven-year-old movie at the time – topped the list of the most-streamed movies in the United States.
The only other pre-2020 movie in the top 10 was Disney stablemate Frozen, which made way more in theaters than the first Moana did. Moana also ranked fourth among all movies in 2022, second in both 2021 and 2020, and, well, that takes us to the beginning of its home service, Disney+, roughly five years ago. By these rough but seemingly undeniable metrics, it seems reasonable to claim that Moana, a movie that in 2016 was outgrossed by both its fellow Disney release Zootopia and its holiday-season rival Sing, is the most-watched family film of the 2020s. If Elsa from Frozen was hoping to hang on to that particular title, she may have to let it go.
Of course, Frozen still has a hypnotic hold on the younger demos; look at any Halloween of the past decade, and you’ll see plenty of little Elsas (and a few Annas) roaming the streets. Beyond Frozen’s particular innovation of including not one but two singing princesses, one with bona fide superpowers, Disney animated movies have always flexed remarkable staying power, especially when they sing catchy songs.
Moana has a princess (of sorts, even if she claims that she’s just the “daughter of the chief”), a great song score (featuring contributions from Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame), and a sweet, relatable story about that chief’s daughter (Auliʻi Cravalho) yearning for adventure, then finding it when she takes it upon herself to seek out demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to help save her native island. Still, even The Rock playing what’s arguably his best and most fitting big-screen role doesn’t fully explain why Moana has been able to consistently out-stream the blockbuster likes of Frozen, or newer and also-beloved titles such as Encanto.
Like nearly every parent who’s had a child since 2010 or so, I have some experience in this area. My daughter was just one year old when Moana was released in the fall of 2016, so she was barely ready to watch a movie for more than 20 minutes or so at home, let alone go out and see one in theaters. But I went to the press screening to file a review, and though I’d enjoyed plenty of other Disney cartoons, I was struck by my emotional response to this one.
Watching Moana, a brave but imperfect young woman, take control of her destiny for her greater good, and commune with her departed grandmother around the film’s climax, I thought of my daughter and wept in my seat. Admittedly, I was also feeling raw about the then recent results of the 2016 presidential election. (Arrival, a movie sometimes cited as catching some adult audiences in an unusually fragile place at that same time, screened for critics earlier, so I saw it in a more broadly hopeful time.)
That sounds deeply embarrassing – exactly the platform needed to unite sneering Trumpheads, disdainful leftists, and avowed enemies of the corporate-friendly “Disney adults” under one tent. But I wasn’t looking at Moana as a specific Hillary stand-in so much as a Disney princess that I didn’t need to approach with affectionate mixed feelings – a good but not impossible role model.
When the movie came out on disc, I bought it, and a Moana doll for good measure, for my kid. It eventually became the first movie she obsessed over. Later she had a hardcore Elsa phase, but it was the introductory song in Moana that, as a toddler, she incorporated into winding summaries of other movies (“make way make way”), and, in turn, the movie itself that clearly played in her head when she heard the soundtrack (“all wet”, she would add at the end of How Far I’ll Go, clarifying what happens to Moana next).
But while I probably did steer my daughter toward the movie, “because adults like it too” is an insufficient and even glib explanation for the Moana coalition, which seems to count in its numbers something like one jillion children. There are plenty of movies I’ve shown my child that didn’t get absorbed into her vocabulary or result in her liking Aladdin Sane (thanks to the unexpectedly ace imitation-Bowie tune Shiny). I do believe that there’s some greater connection between this movie and its youngest audience, maybe subconsciously rooted in the way that the movie doesn’t especially try to subvert fairytale expectations, such as the more jagged (and unpredictable!) plotting of Frozen or the expansion of Tangled, so much as execute a cross-cultural story with sincere aplomb, even wonder.
Some later Disney projects would get overly self-conscious and referential (see last year’s failed 100th-anniversary present Wish), but Moana has just the right hint of self-awareness when its opening sequence shows a baby Moana enthralled by the scary stories her people tell about what awaits beyond the reef, and growing up with that adventuring spirit undeterred. No surprise that my daughter’s daycare class sang How Far I’ll Go at their graduation ceremony in 2019 (or that parents found themselves weeping over a Moana song yet again).
That look toward the horizon is all over children’s entertainment, from past Disney “I want” songs to Star Wars, but Moana distills it powerfully for the child and the parent watching the child, without tying it up in violent conflict or the desire for a romantic relationship. And yeah, Miranda – full disclosure, a college classmate of mine – writes a hell of a catchy song to articulate that primal yearning.
Moana 2 coincidentally betrays a little of the exhaustion of this year’s 2016-rerun US election, and, as such, failed to move me to tears. Don’t be surprised if, like Frozen II, the sequel falls off those year-end streaming charts in a year or two, while the original lingers on. That’s not entirely a knock on the new movie so much as a tribute to the first one, which gives parents and children a horizon to look toward – even or especially if a prince won’t be forthcoming.
