The Live-Action Remake Debate Has the Wrong Question. 'Moana' Is Proof.

Disney's live-action remake of Moana arrived in theaters last week to underwhelming reviews and box office numbers that fell short of even modest projections. But the real problem isn't that it's a remake. It's that it refused to actually remake anything.

This is where the conversation around live-action adaptations usually breaks down. Critics and audiences split into two camps: those who complain remakes change too much, and those who complain they don't change enough. But that's the wrong debate. The real question is simpler. Are the filmmakers making intentional choices about what live action can do that animation cannot?

The Copy-Paste Problem

Moana 2026 is a shot-for-shot replica of the 2016 animated original. The story, the scenes, the pacing, everything transplanted directly into live action with minimal adaptation. Director Thomas Kail treats the material like a museum piece to be preserved rather than a story to be reimagined.

This matters because animation and live action speak different languages. In the animated Moana, the silliness works. Heihei the chicken is delightfully absurd, Tamatoa's vanity is endearingly cartoonish, and the musical numbers feel like natural expressions of heightened emotion in a stylized world. But when you film those same moments with real actors in photorealistic settings, the tonal ground shifts. The quirkiness that charmed in 2D becomes awkward. The songs feel imposed rather than earned.

Catherine Laga'aia, a talented newcomer who clearly studied the character thoroughly, plays Moana with technical precision, but without adding anything of her own. She's delivering the original performance in live action, which means she's delivering a copy of a copy. It reads as safe, like watching a good school play, rather than a lived-in character. That's not a knock on her talent. It's a byproduct of a production that never asked her to bring anything new to the role in the first place.

Even Dwayne Johnson, who voiced the animated Maui, feels miscast here. His star power creates distance. You're watching Dwayne Johnson play a demigod, not disappearing into the role. His face doesn't quite match Maui's tattoo-covered, more angular design, and the muscle suit and wig became their own pre-release punchline. The choice to cast him feels less about what works for live action and more about what works for marketing, and about the fact that he wanted to play this character in the flesh after voicing it.

When Changes Actually Serve the Story

The problem becomes clearer when you look at what good live-action adaptations do differently.

How to Train Your Dragon makes minimal plot changes, but it shifts the tone and mood significantly. The film takes a story that works in animation and makes it epic: grounded, more consequential, darker in places. These tonal changes don't betray the original, they deepen it. A teenager bonding with a dragon is more powerful when both are rendered in live action with weight and consequence. The changes serve the medium.

Mulan (2020) goes further, making substantial changes. It's grittier, more political, more serious about war and duty. But these changes aren't arbitrary. They're about understanding what resonates in live action versus animation. The mysticism becomes subtler, the romance becomes secondary, the action becomes brutal. These choices respect the fact that live-action audiences engage differently with spectacle and emotion than animation audiences do. It's the version of a serious, lore-forward take that I kept wishing Moana had reached for.

Snow White (2025) tried something similar. Casting a younger Rachel Zegler, darkening the tone, modernizing certain elements. Some changes work, like the grittier fairy tale sensibility. Some feel awkward, particularly choices that seem driven by modern sensibilities rather than story logic. But at least the filmmakers were asking the right question: what does this story need to be in live action? Even when they got the answer wrong, and even though Snow White ended up rated lower than Moana in some places, they were working from the right instinct, and the added distance between the 1937 original and this remake gave them more room to justify changes.

Compare this to Lilo & Stitch (2024), which made changes not for storytelling reasons but for budget. Those cuts didn't deepen anything, they just made the film feel smaller, cheaper, more like a Disney Channel movie than a theatrical event. Changes made for the wrong reasons can be just as hollow as no changes at all.

The Real Lesson

The live-action remake debate gets stuck on a false choice: should we stay faithful, or should we reinvent? The actual answer is neither. The question should be, what does this story need to work in this new medium?

Sometimes that means minimal changes but tonal recalibration, like How to Train Your Dragon. Sometimes it means significant rewrites that honor the core, like Mulan. Sometimes it means acknowledging that not enough time has passed for the story to feel like it needs reinterpretation, and making the film anyway, which is arguably what Disney did with Moana. Ten years isn't much runway for a story to feel like it needs a new lens, so everyone involved, Laga'aia included, ends up performing in the shadow of a version that's still fresh in people's minds instead of being freed to bring something new to it.

And still, all of that is a critique of ambition, not execution. The story still works, because it's Moana's story, and that story was strong enough ten years ago to earn $687 million worldwide, and it's strong enough now to carry a copy-paste version. It's entertaining. It's well made. Being safe isn't the same as being bad, and that's why this one lands at four stars for me rather than lower.

Kids will enjoy it whether or not they've seen the original, because they're kids, and it makes for a perfectly good family day at the movies. But there's no real urgency to catch this one in theaters. You already know the story, there are no surprises, no new nuances, nothing here that demands the big screen. Wait for Disney+. Save the theater trip for something that actually needs it.