Moana 2 reveals the catchphrase-laden secret to Disney sucking at sequels

When Moana was first released in 2016, Walt Disney Animation Studios, the main-line, non-Pixar producer of Disney cartoons, had released exactly two sequels: One in 1990 and one in 2000. Sequelizing classics was strictly a novelty business: The Rescuers Down Under got a why-not tryout in 1990 (and is The Rescuers really a classic, anyway? Or is it a movie where a bunch of swamp animals run back and forth yelling “charge!”?), while Fantasia 2000 realized Walt Disney’s previous vision of an iterative Fantasia that would emerge with a mix of new and old segments swapped in and out. Yes, there were a few direct-to-video sequels to The Jungle Book and Peter Pan that inexplicably scored quick-hit theatrical releases, but those weren’t produced by the Tiffany’s of American feature animation, just released as kiddie-matinee fodder in the off-season months. When since-disgraced Pixar honcho John Lasseter took charge of Disney-wide animation in the mid-2000s, those productions, even the barely canonical video sequels that never saw the inside of a theater, got bounced off the lot. The reasoning seemed to be that whatever profits weren’t worth what these subpar movies cost in reputation.

Needless to say, new balance sheets are in effect. Eight years later, it’s not especially newsworthy that the big Disney Thanksgiving release is Moana 2; after all, it’s following on the heels of Ralph Breaks The Internet and Frozen II. This time next year, get ready for another serving of blockbuster leftovers: Zootopia 2 is coming. Encanto’s magic might seem too delicate to risk spoiling with a follow-up; then again, a sequel would doubtless double or triple that movie’s middling box office gross, so maybe don’t bet against it. Disney is a sequel company now.

There are many good, or at least “good,” reasons for this. Kids will love the experience of watching these new movies, whether or not they actively rewatch them as often as the originals. (That probably has as much to do with song quality as anything else, which means the uneven but tuneful Frozen II may get more replays than a Moana sans Lin-Manuel Miranda.) Many adults will too; Disney has a litany of grown-up fans whose reception of their movies are, if not uniformly uncritical, certainly invested in the company’s storied ongoing history. (And in terms of American studio animation, that history is a fascinating one.) Plus, as with any other studio, surefire sequels can theoretically enable the development of riskier, more original fare, and benefit from the long and painstaking development process that often accompanies an original animated feature. Even something originally intended as a TV series, like Moana 2, can be upgraded into lush, feature-worthy animation that outclasses most of its mainstream competition.

Why is it, then, that so far Disney Animation’s sequels have kinda sucked?

That’s overly simplistic, of course. None of the three new-era sequels are exactly bad, covering a comfortable range from OK to pretty decent. They all make a good-faith effort to find a genuine continuation of their predecessors, often with admirable ambition and thoughtfulness. But none is as good as or better than the originals, which means—as sequels, anyway—they all fail to meet the standards set by, uh, The Rescuers Down Under. They’ve also failed to live up to the best of Disney’s other various shingles, which have produced some of the best sequels of the modern age: Toy Story 2! Star Wars: The Last Jedi! Captain America: The Winter Soldier! Yet despite those successes, Disney has been unconsciously preparing their animated sequels to kinda suck for almost a decade. It’s not so much their sequelness that sinks them, but their Disneyness (Disneyosity?).

Moana 2 is a helpful place to start, because it picks up on a thread from other, non-animated Disney sequels of the past decade. It’s not the primary story driver of the sequel, but it’s there: Moana 2 is at least partially about a world where a bunch of people are fans of Moana. Not literally, of course, but Moana and her demigod bestie Maui have become well-known in Moana’s tribe and beyond after their world-saving efforts in the first movie, just as Daisy Ridley’s Rey knows all about the heroes of the original Star Wars trilogy at the outset of The Force Awakens, and later Avengers movies have characters—sometimes including new superheroes!—who geek out a little (or a lot) about the “real” heroes they get to meet. Hell, Agent Coulson already does this with Captain America in the first Avengers team-up, to great effect.) As with those other movies, this leads to some cute real-world parallels, like the young “Moanabe” girls who dress up like their hero, echoing Halloween costumes that have been appropriated all across the land. Or a follow-up to the previous movie’s in-joke about Maui’s designation of Moana as a princess: “A lot of people still think you are,” he notes here.

This self-awareness also prods the movie to engage in some pretty blatant self-consciousness about its own iconography. And look, most mainstream, sequels have callbacks and references; that’s hard to avoid. But Moana 2 can scarcely avoid reprising a single memorable moment from the first movie, from major (a poor imitation of “You’re Welcome” sung by Maui; the return of the little coconut warrior people) to minor (Maui referring to Heihei the chicken as “boat snack”) to Easter-eggy (bringing back the kid in Moana’s tribe with the slick dance moves and suggestive face). In between these moments, Moana 2 is an eye-filling follow-up adventure with one of Disney’s best-ever princesses. (Just consider it an honorific, Moana.) It doesn’t need to match the emotional heft of the original movie to work as a family-friendly fantasy.

When the movie succumbs to its callbacks, though, its cultural context as a Disney movie makes those limitations feel like more than just a typical, treatable case of sequelitis. They actively construct borders around the movie’s otherwise expansive world, assuring us that in the years since the events of Moana, the characters have mostly spent their time discussing those events in the language of breakout catchphrases. Otherwise vivid characters speak, in other words, like they’re spending their downtime on the endless branded t-shirts you can find at Disney theme parks, reprising their famous lines, winking at each other and the audience for getting the joke. In long-running cartoons like the Looney Tunes shorts or The Simpsons, catchphrases can take on a kind of rhythmic humor of their own, subject to knowing repetition and clever variation, a gateway to meta-humor. In narrative features that aren’t principally comedies, this kind of repetition tends to flatten any illusion of spontaneity. (Obviously, the creation of animated movies is anything but spontaneous, but the best ones don’t encourage you to think about this.) They can turn anything from character moments to action sequences to memorable imagery into de facto sloganeering.

The closer you look at Disney culture in the 21st century, the more pervasive this practice is, especially as the company continues to extend and market their characters following their introductions. A frying-pan-wielding Rapunzel crying out “Best! Day! Ever!” becomes her trademark shtick, rather than discrete gestures that speak to her reactions to story turns in the moment. Loki being “burdened with glorious purpose” can no longer be confined to one elegant turn of phrase in the first Avengers movie; the phrase itself becomes a more-burden-than-glorious perma-callback. Zootopia didn’t even wait for a sequel or spin-off to repeat “It’s called a hustle, sweetheart” as if expecting a massive ovation.

This self-referentiality makes sense, and is even a source of delight in, say, that gathering of Disney princesses in Ralph Breaks The Internet, a movie that’s in part about exactly that kind of dizzying cultural convergence and how its central characters do or do not fit into certain narrative formulas. In a movie like Zootopia, though, the callbacks are just supposed to just be good screenwriting: a set-up joke toward the beginning with an unexpectedly resonant pay-off toward the end. But Disney’s movies have become so transparently thirsty for a truly great one of those that they can barely breathe; it’s as if Disney has spent entire seminars teaching its filmmakers how to replicate the “it’s falling, with style” bit from the first Toy Story, or calling back to “on your left” many movies after The Winter Soldier. Just as clearly as those initial moments satisfy in their homes, the effort in reviving them and perpetuating them as marketing slogans shows. In other words, they could do this all day. No one has learned the art of the toss-off, so none of these reprisals play like, say, the variations on “I have a bad feeling about this” across the Star Wars movies. They’re so conscious of the audience, and of Disney fandom in general, that they threaten to turn into those ghastly “live-action” remakes that recreate the work of brilliant animators, likely uncompensated for the self-ripoffs.

Disney has been a massive conglomerate for a long time, and sometimes took on the values of one even when it was smaller and scrappier. Ultimately their decision to make a lot of sequels will probably affect the movie business more than the specifics of how they’re made. Yet there can be a crowd-pleasing art to following the adventures of ongoing characters. Movies like The Last Jedi, The Winter Soldier, and the Toy Story series are particularly satisfying not in spite of their sequel status, but because of it, taking advantage of audience investment in certain characters to reveal new dimensions to those characters. There’s no reason a character like Moana couldn’t receive similar treatment. But Disney sequels have increasingly resembled the theme-park attractions that used to be the primary way their movies might expand their narratives or encroach into our world. There’s a certain magic in that process when it involves immersing yourself in a relatively unusual experience (even if it can be mercenary and relentlessly overpriced). It’s less effective when the movies themselves feel imagined largely in those terms, like they all live inside Disney+ rather than their own worlds. Maybe that contributes to an environment where a heartfelt “I want” song like “How Far I’ll Go” becomes unofficially reprised as “Beyond,” which itself vaguely knocks off “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II, which itself self-consciously imitates the showstopping “Let It Go” from the original Frozen.

None of those songs intend to wink at the audience for recognizing their thematic or musical connections. But the Disneyfication process gives tacit permission for this shamelessness—it’s all part of My Disney Experience, as one of their web portals calls itself. Regular sequels are no longer enough; every movie must be a sequel, tribute, theme-park attraction, and legacy unto itself. “I could do this all day” and “you’re welcome” start to sound more like threats.