Name: Moana
Director: Thomas Kail
Genre: Family, Fantasy, Comedy, Adventure
Released: 2026-07-08T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 115 min
Cast: Catherine Lagaʻaia, Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams

A drawn wave can carry feeling. It can swell on cue, hold a color, part like a curtain, behave less like water than like a second character with its own intentions. That was the quiet achievement of the animated film: an ocean that acted. The live-action remake inherits that ocean and a harder brief, which is to render it as something photographic and have it keep acting.

The new film keeps the shape of the story. A young wayfinder leaves the reef of her island against her family’s wishes; a demigod who once stole the heart of a creator goddess owes the world a favor. What changes is the surface. Animation let the original stylize everything at once: the skin, the foam, the particular saturated blue of open water, the way a face could simplify to two lines and a curve. Live action withdraws that license. Every frame now has to negotiate between the real and the fantastical, and the marketing so far suggests that negotiation is the whole project rather than a side effect of it.

The casting reads as a statement of intent. Catherine Lagaʻaia, a newcomer of Samoan descent, takes the title role and keeps the character inside the culture the story draws from. Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui, the one performance carried directly across from the animation; he voiced the demigod before, and he becomes the literal bridge between the two versions of the film. Around them sit Rena Owen as Gramma Tala, John Tui as Chief Tui and Frankie Adams as Sina, a largely Pasifika and Māori ensemble that anchors the production’s claim to cultural specificity rather than treating the setting as backdrop.

Thomas Kail directs, and this is his first feature. He built his reputation on the stage, most visibly on a musical whose engine was motion, rhythm and the choreography of bodies moving through a fixed space. That instinct is legible when the camera is a proscenium. It is untested against an environment that is, for long stretches, built inside a computer. The genuine tension of the production is whether a director of live performance can hold a film whose principal scene partner is a simulation, and whether the staging discipline that served the theatre translates to water that has to be invented shot by shot.

The look is where the conversation has already started, and it is the part worth watching most closely. The trailer’s palette arrived muted, cooler and grayer than the animation’s tropical brightness, and audiences read the grade as a loss of the original’s heat. Maui, rendered with photoreal skin over Johnson’s features, sits closer to the uncanny than the cartoon ever needed to risk; the cartoon could exaggerate a tattoo into a character and never trip the eye, while a real surface invites a real comparison. The music survives more easily than the image does. The songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foaʻi and Mark Mancina return, with a new Miranda piece, “Along the Way,” that folds in Auliʻi Cravalho, the original voice of the role. A score can travel between media almost intact. A surface cannot, and the recurring objection that a film built this heavily on effects is live action mostly in name is, underneath the complaint, a question about the image itself.

What the remake does not answer is why it arrives so soon. The animated film is recent, and its sequel was a billion-dollar success only months ago, which makes the case for re-photographing the same story now more commercial than artistic. Disney‘s live-action record offers no clean precedent either: one recent fairy-tale remake underperformed against its budget amid sustained controversy, while another property crossed a billion the same season, so the form guarantees nothing on its own. Photoreal water may not carry the emotional shorthand that a drawn ocean delivered in a single gesture, and whether the production extends the franchise’s cultural-consultancy rigor into a heavily computer-generated frame has not been spelled out in any detail.

The screenplay is by Jared Bush, co-writer of the animated original, and Dana Ledoux Miller, who worked on the sequel, which keeps continuity at the script level even as the medium changes. Cravalho serves as an executive producer alongside Johnson, a structure that lets the previous lead pass the role on while staying inside the project. The credited principals run from Lagaʻaia, Johnson, Owen, Tui and Adams to Jemaine Clement, who returns as the voice of the hoarding crab Tamatoa. Walt Disney Studios distributes, and the film runs one hundred and fifteen minutes.

The remake reaches Spanish cinemas under the title Vaiana on 8 July; the franchise carries that name across much of Europe, and opens in Italy as Oceania, in both cases for trademark reasons rather than editorial ones. It opens in the United States on 10 July. The soundtrack arrives slightly ahead of the film, on 26 June, which means the songs will be in circulation before anyone can judge whether the ocean around them holds.