Disney’s most ambitious fantasy adventure is a #1 streaming hit for a brutally obvious reason

Love it or hate it, Disney is no slouch when it comes to animated musicals. Its songwriters, composers, and lyricists, like Alan Menken and The Sherman Brothers, have gone on to create extraordinary classical musical numbers — think The Little Mermaid‘s “Kiss the Girl” and Tangled‘s “I See the Light” — that we remember and think fondly of even now. What’s more, while we all love the classics, Disney hasn’t stopped creating some absolute bangers either: both the 2010s and the 2020s have given us hits from beloved movies like Encanto and Frozen.

Yet as great as all of these animated musicals are, no other Disney film since then has made me feel as emotional and changed as I did when I left the cinema after seeing Moana in 2016. A coming-of-age story about a Polynesian girl named Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho), the daughter of a village chief who is chosen by the ocean to restore the heart of the goddess Te Fiti and save her island of Motunui, Moana is a heartfelt and thrilling adventure. It’s no wonder, then, that after seeing the lackluster live-action version released this month, that the original 2016 film is surging on Disney Plus.

When Moana first floated on the scene in 2016, directors John Musker and Ron Clements had a lot to prove. Disney had decades of history behind it, and their animated musical films were a thing of legend. Musker and Clements needed something that wouldn’t just be good — it had to be able to sit alongside other musical classics like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty. How they went about doing that, and why Moana remains as one of the most legendary musicals of all time, was simple: they had an incredible team at their back.

With an original script penned by Academy Award-winning writer and director Taika Waititi, later refined by Zootopia‘s director-writer Jared Bush, the narrative is carefully refined and never wastes a second. Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame and Tokelauan-Tuvaluan composer Opetaia Foa’i handled the excellent musical score and numbers. There’s also an incredible cast that features names like Dwayne Johnson and Temuera Morrison. Truly, the combined efforts of Moana’s creative team forged a film that shone brighter than Te Kā’s flames. This team knew how to utilize compelling characters and narrative with musical numbers that were well-placed, creative, and able to touch the viewer’s heart, no matter who they were.

Despite being virtually identical, the 2026 live-action remake by Thomas Kail never comes close to those heights. Even with The Rock reprising his role as Maui and newcomer Catherine Laga’aia taking over from Cravalho as the determined Moana, the live-action fails to deliver the same heart-stirring feeling as the original. The film’s dedication to including Polynesian actors is its one saving grace, because everything else is substantially inferior. There’s the bland, dull appearance of Motunui. There’s the fact that most creatures look like they’re straight-up ripped from the animated version. Even the film’s most moving moments, like the heartbreaking death of Gramma Tala and, later, her ghost giving Moana the hope to take on Te Ka by herself, are unable to capture the emotional depth and beauty that the animated original does effortlessly.

However, the 2026 adaptation’s biggest sin is its incapability to find an identity in a film where finding out who you truly are is what makes up its very heart. As our own Tasha Robinson summed up in our review, there is “no artistic or aesthetic reason for this movie to exist.” So, don’t bother sating your curiosity about Kail’s adaptation and instead stick to the original, the way it was meant to be watched.

Moana and its animated sequel, Moana 2, are available to stream on Disney Plus.