Moana 2 review – vacuum-packed Disney ocean adventure that will leave you cold

Originally planned as a TV series, now a feature film, Moana 2 is the sequel to Disney’s smash-hit family animation Moana from 2016, and really it’s a vacuum-packed slice of digital IP content, a perky ChatGPT iteration of love, laughter and belonging.

Hawaiian-born actor Auli’i Cravalho returns to voice the role of Moana, the teen heroine on a Polynesian island. In the first film, she was chosen by her wayfinding ancestors and the mysterious forces of the ocean to restore the natural order of things, disrupted by the swaggering but somehow adorable demigod Maui, voiced by Dwayne Johnson. Now it’s a few years later and Moana is a much respected young woman on the island, admired and imitated by the female inhabitants that Maui calls “Mo-wannabes”.

We find Moana on a mission to find other islands and other people of the ocean who have been scattered and oppressed by the evil god Nalo in order to keep them divided; she returns to her homeland with the sensational news that the island Motufetu has been submerged with all its people by Nalo’s awful curse, and if they can somehow raise it, this will restore all her kindred to their rightfully united state.

So Moana has to go on another of her quests, with the more-or-less-reliable help of Maui, flaunting as before his animated tattoos. Also around are her friend Loto (voiced by Rose Matafeo), elderly bad-tempered farmer Kele (David Fane), whose agricultural skills and resources are supposedly going to come in handy on the voyage, and Moni (Hualalai Chung), a big goofy guy, almost Maui’s mini-me, who may have a cert-PG friend-crush on Moana. They encounter once more the faintly Minion-esque little coconut-shaped marauders, the Kakamora, with whom Moana is this time in a position to make common cause, and the wicked “bat lady” villain Matangi (voiced by Maori performer Awhimai Fraser) who appears and disappears in the action more briefly, perhaps, than she should have done.

It is all inoffensive enough, but weirdly lacking in anything genuinely passionate or heartfelt, all managed with frictionless smoothness and algorithmic efficiency.

• Moana 2 is released on 27 November in the US, 28 November in Australia and 29 November in the UK.