When Disney’s Moana first graced theaters in 2016, audiences were introduced to an adventurous heroine who defied her island’s boundaries, setting sail on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery. Eight years later, Moana 2 has smashed box office records, captivating viewers with stunning visuals and an emotionally rich narrative.
This sequel, which follows Moana three years after her first voyage, dives deeper into Polynesian mythology while showcasing the extraordinary advancements in Disney Animation’s artistry.
Directed by David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, Moana 2 challenges its characters—and Disney’s animators—with a more expansive story and ambitious visuals. The film sees Moana answering an ancestral call to break an ancient curse, encountering new friends and foes along the way, including Nalo, the formidable god of storms.
Breathing Life Into Nalo: Disney’s Most Complex Villain Yet
“In a story about connection, Nalo is really a god of disconnection,” explains Derrick Jr. The character posed a significant challenge for Disney’s team, requiring cutting-edge animation techniques to depict his terrifying presence as a living weather system. “It’s a whole weather system that is also a villain,” says Amy Smeed, head of animation. “When you see it on the big screen, it’s incredibly impressive.”
To bring Nalo to life, animators worked closely with Disney’s FX and lighting teams, inventing new tools to seamlessly integrate tornados, waves, and atmospheric effects into his character. “We put our heads together with the smartest people we know,” says Kevin Webb, another head of animation. “It’s all collaboration, and the alchemy of working with the best artists and technologists in the world.”
It’s an epic story that calls for equally epic sequences and set pieces — and those are what the team at Disney Animation does best. For example, Moana finds herself in uncharted waters when she meets Nalo, the god of storms.
“In a story about connection, Nalo is really a god of disconnection,” David Derrick Jr., who directs Moana 2 with Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller, explains. “In storyboards, we talked about how frightening Te Kā was in the first film, so we had to beat that. Nalo has been the culmination of so many artists working together to create something that frankly, we didn’t know we could do through FX, animation, and lighting. It’s absolutely incredible.”
Amy Smeed, one of the heads of animation, says the introduction of Nalo led to “the most complicated sequences we created on this film,” explaining, “It’s a whole weather system that is also a villain, and it’s incredibly impressive when you see all of that on a big screen.”
Creating a villain like Nalo was no easy feat. According to Kevin Webb, one of the heads of animation, the filmmakers needed to develop cutting-edge technology so that elements such as “tornados and giant waves” would accurately depict his power.
“We had to invent a bunch of tools so we could hand things off to FX, who could then build off of that,” he says. “It’s all collaboration, honestly. Amy and I are not writing any tools. We get in the room with all the smartest people we know, and we put our heads together. ‘What’s the best solution for pulling this particular task off? Do we need to write a new tool, or do we need to build a new asset? How many departments does this need to go through?’ The wonderful thing about working at Disney is that we have the best artists and technologists in the world here. You get them all in a room together, you get that alchemy, and wonderful things happen.”
And those weren’t the only advances that the story’s scope necessitated.
Riding the Wave
“There’s been so much innovation and technology over the years,” says Smeed, whose past credits include Tangled (2010), Frozen (2013), Big Hero 6 (2014), Moana (2016), and Raya and the Last Dragon (2021). “But at the end of the day, as character animators, we are going through and handcrafting each individual frame. Any time we can find ways to make things more efficient, it means that we can spend more time iterating and [asking ourselves]: What are the best choices for the character performance?”
That question was often posed to animation reference choreographer Tiana Liufau, a film’s Oceanic Cultural Trust member who developed an array of actions, dances, and expressions. “In animation, the person who probably helped us the most was Tiana Nonosina Liufau. In all of the song sequences — even ones that weren’t necessarily ‘choreographed’ throughout — we would have moments where we would lean on her,” says Webb, whose past credits include Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and Strange World (2023).
“We’d say, ‘Hey, we need something here that feels specific to the region and specific to this moment.’ And she might just send us a little video clip of a hand pose or a finger position — a simple movement that would help us do something that feels music-like, even though it’s not choreographed, that was also true to the region and the culture.”
Natural Flow
Because Moana 2 is set three years after the first film, each character’s appearance has been updated accordingly — an endeavor that was done “very carefully,” says Daniel Arriaga, art director of characters. “We didn’t want to change what people love about them.” Moana has become “more confident” as a person and as a leader, he adds, so her actions needed to convey that.
Smeed adds that they also wanted to capture the “athleticism” Moana has built up since the first film. “She’s more confident this time around. She’s been a leader in her community for the past three years. How does that change things like her posture and her stance?” she asks. “It was really exciting to be a part of animating that character again and taking her to that next level.”
Moana 2 introduces several new characters, including Loto (voiced by Rose Matafeo), Kele (voiced by David Fane), and Moni (voiced by Hualālai Chung) — a motley crew from Motunui whom Moana recruits to join her journey. “I love drawing them in groups,” Arriaga says.
“You get to see how their shapes play off of each other. You figure out: ‘What would look good here? What are we missing? We have someone shorter. We have someone wider. Now we need someone a little bit taller.’ With Kele, for example, I loved going skinny with his legs and his arms and then giving him these big, floppy feet — and this huge belly! Those kinds of shape differences and variations in a single person are my absolute favorite.”
Into the Swim
While much of Moana 2 features CG animation, it incorporates a longstanding and vital tradition: hand-drawn animation. Having played a crucial role in Moana, veteran animator and director Eric Goldberg returned to supervise the sequel’s hand-drawn animation team.
In the first film, Maui explained to Moana that his tattoos simply show up when he earns them. But of course, they don’t just “show up” onscreen; someone has to animate them. Maui’s living tattoo, aka Mini Maui, is perhaps the most obvious example of how hand-drawn and CG animation work hand-in-hand. “Mini Maui and Maui have their own relationship, and then Moana comes in and befriends Maui,” Smeed says. “It’s interesting to see the dynamic between Mini Maui and Maui [evolve]; it adds some comedy to the story.”
Having seamlessly blended the two animation styles before — most recently in the short film Once Upon a Studio (2023) — the process was remarkably smooth. “Ideally, we tried to have the hand-drawn animation done at the same time as the CG animation,” Smeed recalls. “It didn’t always work out that way, but we did make sure that before a shot was approved and sent down the pipeline, the directors were able to see [hand-drawn] Mini Maui and CG Maui together. Basically, Eric and his team would do the drawings for Mini Maui, and then we would import that into Maya, which is the software we use to animate.”
Given Goldberg’s pedigree, animators clamored for the chance to collaborate with his team. “One of the fun things is we had many CG animators reaching out to us to say, ‘Can I please work on a shot with Maui that has Mini Maui?’” Smeed says. “They wanted the chance to collaborate with Eric and his team, which was a very a fun journey for everyone.”
Diving Back In
For the animators, getting to continue Moana’s story was a dream come true.
“When I saw the original film back in 2016, I fell in love with Moana’s optimism and her unflappable energy,” Webb says. “She’s just such a winning character. I got to revisit the film again after my daughter was born. She had latched on to it when she was about 2 years old, so I got to see it through her eyes and see what she gravitated towards. Getting the chance to be back in this world and work on this film with this character is incredible.”
Smeed adds, “After we finished the first film, it felt like, ‘Oh, no! We don’t get to see her every day.’ So, it was great coming back for this film and getting to interact with her again.”
Moana 2 is currently in theaters.
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