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The Moana Remake Is So Much Worse Than You Think...

Marina McBain

266,495 views

The Moana live-action remake is finally here, and somehow Disney has managed to take one of its most beloved animated movies and make it feel completely lifeless...

After years of controversial live-action remakes, from snow white to Lilo and Stitch, Moana was supposed to be the easy one! Disney barely changed the story, brought Dwayne Johnson back as Maui and recreated entire scenes from the original almost exactly. Yet the film still received terrible reviews and seriously underperformed at the box office...

In this video, I’m breaking down everything wrong with the 2026 Moana remake, why copying the animated movie didn’t save it, how the performances, music and visuals compare to the original, and why Disney’s live-action formula has finally stopped working!

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Contents of this video:

00:00 - Intro
01:32 - How to destroy a classic
08:57 - The live action disaster...

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20 Comments

@shanessie6671 2 months ago

"The rock has no nipples" was not what I expect to hear first thing in the morning

@thatfuzzypotato1877 2 months ago (edited)

Its not just the lack of nipples making Dwayne look uncanny. Its how his face looks like a 60 year old but his body has flawless youthful skin, amd exaggerated muscles you only see in dehydrated body builders in renal failure during a show. It makes it look like a cheap costume

Also, to make Nani'a decision even worse: the university of hawaii is considered to be the best marine biology program in the US and native Hawaiians csn attend for free. So Nani ditched Lilo for 6 figures of debt instead of staying home for a free degree of better quality and an intact family.

Owlkitty manages to make greenscreen scenes smoother than a multi-billion dollar company, and shes just a black cat edited into famous movie scenes (like as the trex in jurassic park) the green screen in moana looks somehow worse than people filmed in front of a cardboard painting from 1930s films.

@Gennie_CC 2 months ago

Normalize watching more animation, and let's just stop lifeless live actions!!!

@shelbydan 2 months ago

i’ll NEVER understand why they’d have Nani move to CA for marine biology when the University of Hawaii is RIGHT THERE

@zeekay9941 2 months ago

The problem with live action is the mentality of thinking it's more creatively free when in reality, it's less free and more restricting. You can get away with a lot through animation and suspend disbelief. Live action has to sell that these characters can exist in real life. The tone, pacing, atmosphere, and character development journey will not be the same.

@coronastern 2 months ago

I really hope they stay away from Encanto ...

@matthewlopetegui6204 2 months ago

moana feels way too recent to be made into a live action film, there’s just something about animations that gives a movie so much life and disney completely stripped that away when they make these live actions. we really do need JUSTICE for the original moana

@ToPureToBePink 2 months ago

And that’s why the live action Cinderella was great. It kept what it needed to still be Cinderella but it was it’s own movie with more development. It also looked fabulous and used minimal cgi. Justice

@bpanjavan 2 months ago

7:35 “Ohana” means abandon your sister to child protective services so you can travel and pursue marine biology 😒

@peppaxing7204 2 months ago

Her hair during promotion is more moana than in the movie

@Sleepyzeld 2 months ago

This is a perfect example of why some pieces of media need to be left animated. Animation has a unique way of capturing stories that live action cannot, and I believe the reverse is also true. It’s so painfully obvious that it’s just about money and not art. It’s depressing.

@cissi168 2 months ago

i remain convinced disney continues making live action movies to commit tax fraud.

@Jesus-is-king-w1y 2 months ago

I didn’t know it had come out yet lol

@marcrufer6686 2 months ago

The problem with a shot-for-shot remake is that, at best, it can be just as good as the original (or even worse) and if it’s worse, you might as well just watch the original, which makes the remake Superfluous.

@NickNapoli 2 months ago

Disney has lost the plot for the last 10 to 15 years.

@DevsCritters 2 months ago

7:49 and the wild thing is that adult former foster youths talk at length, openly, everywhere, about how wildly traumatic being ripped away from your family and placed in foster care is… so horrible

@MeggyEggy-o3w 2 months ago

Justice for animation, I personally love the way that it can convey things that can't happen in real life! I don't get the hype of making things seem more real. They aren't meant to seem real, they are cartoonist movies. Animation also gives so much life to a story.

@JamesJimmaHarding 2 months ago

Basically everything after 2017 has been a giant fail for Disney, except Encanto and Zootopia 2!

@Harold-Sleeper 2 months ago

6:46 My brother summed up the remake in a pretty funny way: "Come on, trust the government and make sure to abandon your sister to go to college. Let's have dreams, kids!" I don't really see any other way to look at it anymore 😂