From dynamic demigods to sentient seas, the original Moana directed by John Musker and Ron Clement was very entertaining and a unique movie. That’s why when I heard the sequel, Moana 2, directed by David G. Derrick Junior, Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, would be released, I had doubts the movie would be as good as the first because of the common trend of sequels being worse than the first—which, this movie also followed.

It starts with Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) exploring an island with her animal companions, Pua the pig and Hei Hei the rooster, hoping to find more people who live by the oceans. While searching an island, Hei Hei accidentally finds a shard of pottery that does not belong to Moana’s civilization, Motunui. 

Moana’s ancestor and legendary Wayfinder, Tautai Vasa (Gerald Ramsey), shows her a vision that foretold if Moana did not manage to raise the island Motufetu, the people of Motunui would perish in the future.The island of Motufetu was sunk by the storm god Nalo, whose goal was to gain power over mortals.

 To save her people from peril, she teams up with craftswoman Loto (Rose Matafeo), historian Moni (Hualālai Chung), and farmer Kele (David Fane), running into Maui (Dwayne Johnson) along the way. Together, they go on a quest to save Motunui.

While the movie has a creative plotline, it has many questionable or rushed details—most notably Moana’s little sister, Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda.) The trailers for the movie depict the bond between Moana and Simea, and it is admittedly quite cute. However, Simea plays little to no role in the movie with minimal lines other than waiting for Moana to come back, leading me to wonder if Simea was created just for trailers to gain more attraction to the movie, or just so Moana could have more of a reason to doubt going on her quest to save Motunui, which is a very weak line of reasoning.

One reason for the inconsistencies in the movie may exist because it wasn’t designed to be a movie. In an interview with Collider, the directors revealed that the movie was initially supposed to be a Disney+ TV show series. This would explain the lack of plot cohesion; what would be normally fleshed out more in a TV show was crammed into an hour and 40-minute film, limiting the character development that the characters deserved and frankly needed.

For example, side characters such as Loto and Moni had little to no development whatsoever, while the extent of Kele’s development is going from hating Maui to liking him. For being supposedly pivotal members of Moana’s crew, they’re also extremely useless. There are multiple instances in the movie where the presence of the crew ends up hindering Moana instead of helping, and they are mostly irrelevant and forgettable to the story.

In addition to cramming character development, the movie was overflowing with half-baked songs. Moana 2 had a whopping 16 songs in the soundtrack—which would normally be good for a musical movie, except the songs didn’t add much to the storyline, were mainly cheesy, and weren’t even that catchy.

Although the story lacked a fleshed-out storyline, the movie excelled in its animation. As expected of a movie with a $150 million budget, the animation was fluid and clean. A scene that struck me was when Maui was first shown in the movie, and a crystal-like ball had a smooth, streamlined swirling smoke animation, to the point that I thought about that scene multiple times throughout the day just because of its beauty

Overall, Moana 2 was a forgettable experience for me, and quite disappointing. The movie had a lot of potential, but fell short under the pressure of being as good as the first movie, leading me to give it a two out of five. Hopefully, the next movie will way-find a way to fish up redemption.