How Moana 2's Success Can Screw Up the Future of Disney Animation
In case you don't know, the animation industry is in a hellish place right now.
The lack of new projects commissioned by Hollywood studios has prevented animators from landing jobs lately. The Animation Guild has just started negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to get a better deal for their work. That bitch, David Zaslav, kicked the hornet's nest of shelving animated projects for tax breaks that many other studios seemed to follow. Major staff layoffs happened at Pixar due to low box office numbers (Lightyear) and negligent corporate decisions to have some of their best flicks in years (Turning Red, Luca, Soul) die on Disney+.
But one major issue these days is outsourcing, especially for studios founded on *country twang voice* American soil! DreamWorks, for example, decided to forgo developing feature projects in-house entirely and focus on outsourcing their work to animation studios outside the US. The Wild Robot was the last feature completely made at their Glendale branch. Even movies developed in-house like The Bad Guys have sequels largely animated by Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver. The average moviegoer won't notice, but here at Rendy Reviews, we certainly do. We’re elephants up in here: never forgetting jack-shit!
While that's an issue in itself, Disney might follow suit due to the success of Moana 2, which is not a good thing for the future of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Before we get to that, let's go back to a few years ago.
In 2021, Walt Disney Animation Studios opened a small Vancouver animation studio solely to make animated content for Disney+. It's what the now-defunct Disneytoons Studio was supposed to be for direct-to-DVD animated sequels… but for streaming. Their first projects were supposed to be a Moana series and a 2D-animated Tiana show (our pal Nina, who did much of this site's original artwork, currently works on the series).
Alas, due to the string of L's Disney Animation took in the box office recently with the middling Strange World and Wish, a film I famously detest, Disney Animation made a last-second decision to modify the Moana series into a movie. Neither of its stars, Dwayne Johnson nor Auli'i Cravalho (who was already on the Disney payroll with Hailey's On It!) signed on to reprise their roles at the time. Cravalho joked that she didn't know about it until she saw the Instagram announcement.
Let me remind you: animation is a long ass process. It's ridiculous that the project you've been working on gets a major, last-minute change to fit another medium that wasn't in your job description when you signed on. Imagine you're a television animator working on a TV show for years and being told, “Oh, we have to make this episodic series into a movie now, and you have less than a year to do so because we have to make that Q4 Thanksgiving bag. And no, you can't stop this!”
This is the same shit the Frozen II team (Jesus, this is the second time I'm mentioning this movie on this site in the past month) had to deal with in 2019. The filmmakers had issues ironing out the story and pacing, but Bob Iger wouldn't budge the release date, so it wasn't concerning to the execs that the movie arrived undercooked. The film just had to be released, PERIOD.
Back to Moana 2. I can only assume that those animators' pay grades barely increased or stayed stagnant. And even then, they’re working at an animation studio in another country where their wages are considerably lower than in the U.S. Because animation is a long process and the movie became a rushed job, one can speculate that these animators had to familiarize themselves with feature software, work extensive shifts, or possibly crunch towards the finish line. If that doesn't define exploitation, I don't know what does. While there hasn't been an article stating this yet, I can only imagine that was the case considering how animators on Pixar's Inside Out 2 also suffered from crunching, overworking themselves seven days a week for two months so they could reach the movie's deadline and appease execs. And remember, that movie was announced as a movie to begin with. Lord knows the horror stories from Moana 2's race to November 27's release.
Additionally, the workers at Disney Animation Vancouver aren't unionized, unlike the Burbank branch. That meant Disney could slash the animators' salaries and still make them work on Moana 2 for dirt cheap. Oh, most of these productions require Americans to uproot their entire lives from the US to Canada so they can work for a lower wage. Countless Americans are working in the Vancouver studio, even our Nina, whom we haven't seen in quite some time. I heard from industry professionals that when the project was retooled, the LA studio shared some of the film's workload. However, most of the film was produced in Vancouver. And I truly doubt they got any bonuses for completing the project on time, considering their job title was “television animator.”
Does Moana 2 feel like a TV show?
Oh, definitely. At best, Moana 2 is thematically cohesive, more so than the previous Disney animated sequels, like Frozen II. The final product reflects the difficult rush job on production. I liked some aspects of the film, such as seeing Moana mature and the scope of the few set pieces. I adored the first act and the finale because the writing acts as a serviceable follow-up to Moana with the titular lead wanting to continue the mission her voyager ancestor Tautai Vasa failed to complete.
Yet, I did myself a disservice by watching the predecessor the day before the sequel, for the downgrade in quality is blatant across the board. The water textures aren't impressive, and the character animation is often zippier, not aligning with the tone of the predecessor. Dwayne Johnson's voice acting and singing feel dispassionate and the pacing is wonky as hell. But the moment she hits the sea with her thankless crew of one-note villager characters, the pacing gets worse. It's all so disjointed and messy, that you can point out when an episode was supposed to end and the next begin. By the time the climax arrives, it's like "Wait, we're here already?"
Also, the music is just not good. I guess that's what you get when you hire The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical gals to replace Lin-Manuel Miranda. But hey, Barlow & Bear is still leaps and bounds better than whatever the hell Julia Michaels did last year with Wish. I didn’t get a “WATCH OUT, WORLD, HERE I ARE!” in this film and I’m grateful.
I'm not going to sit here and say, “Welcome back, Disney-to-DVD sequels,” because the worst of those were just offensively bad. Even then, Moana 2 can't escape from feeling like a TV show blown up for the big screen at the last minute. If the series stayed true to its original form, Moana’s villager companions would've had episodic arcs dedicated to them so they could be a part of the adventure. But as they stand, they're all particularly useless, especially the grumpy old farmer Kele (David Fane), who was serving typical grumpiness with a character design that evoked Polynesian Robert Freeman/Granddad from The Boondocks.
In an Entertainment Weekly preview article from this past September, Cravahlo discussed that she did some voice recordings for the series. Yet, according to the article she, describes the shift as a “kill your darlings” experience, as songs, sequences, and character moments were cut for the sake of the storytelling. I---UGH!
Why would Moana 2's success be so bad?
The quality drop in production and storyline is unlikely to be noticed by the average moviegoer, and Disney seems to be hoping for that. It's hard not to worry about what will happen WHEN the movie does well. Disney will either lay off workers within the Burbank branch or relocate them to the Vancouver studio. As aforementioned, there are already so many American-based workers who had to uproot their lives for Canada. It won't be surprising if they make more employees do so.
As there are currently only a few projects in development for Disney+ aside from Tiana, I would not be surprised if Disney decides to follow in the footsteps of DreamWorks and discontinue production from their in-house department in favor of outsourcing projects to their Vancouver branch. This is because the Vancouver branch's workers are not unionized and can produce recognizable and established IP projects that bear the Disney Animation Studios' name with lower budgets, thereby ensuring that the movies remain successful.
Considering similar issues that plagued other Disney projects like Frozen II and Inside Out 2, Moana 2 – while being the worst of the three egregious examples – is likely to become central to Disney's future work mode. I predict that the Mouse House will prioritize their non-American studio to save costs and for more financially beneficial aspects that will affect the quality of their features and impact the livelihoods of LA-based animators in the process. It doesn't matter how basic, underdeveloped, or telegraphed Moana 2 was. Its instant success will mark a dark era for the future of Disney animation. In a time when the industry is pivoting to either outsourcing or fucking AI – all except Illumination Studios, for some reason – it's frightening to think about the repercussions of Moana 2's inevitable success. I hoped this irrational practice will not become routine anytime soon, and that the animators got the compensation they deserved for turning a television project into a friggin’ feature. But considering that every Disney movie in recent memory had some sort of egregious production issue, I'm not keeping my hopes up.
Update: At time of this being published, Moana 2 opened to a $221 million gross domestically and $386 worldwide.
Bloody hell.
