In a trailer on the Hawaiian set, Dwayne Johnson sat motionless for two and a half hours as a team of artists layered a 40-pound (18-kilogram) prosthetic bodysuit over his frame, glued a long, softly tonged wig to his scalp, and painted the tattoos that would come alive on screen. The suit, designed by Oscar-winning makeup artist Joel Harlow from a cast of the actor’s own torso, was not a digital effect but a physical second skin. “I had to adjust to expressing emotion while carrying an extra 40 pounds of prosthetics, hair, and body costume,” Johnson later recalled. The weight was a constant, tangible reminder that this Maui would be mortal, not animated—a demigod anchored to the earth by silicone and sweat.

When the film premiered at the Hollywood Bowl, the Polynesian dance performance that opened the evening signalled the cultural stakes. Johnson, who has Samoan heritage, told the crowd that his grandfather, the high chief and professional wrestler Peter Maivia, was the inspiration for Maui’s flowing hair, build, and tattoos. “This is for him,” he said. The moment was freighted with meaning for Pacific Islander communities, who saw in the casting of Catherine Laga‘aia, John Tui, and Frankie Adams a commitment to representation that the original animation had championed. Yet even as the Bowl erupted, critics in London were filing notices that described the film as a “waste of everyone’s time and talent,” a “carbon copy” so faithful to the 2016 original that it reproduced scenes, songs, and dialogue almost verbatim.

The ten-year gap between the animated Moana and its live-action remake is the shortest in Disney’s history—a fact that has puzzled analysts in Los Angeles and fed a broader debate about the studio’s strategy. The original film remains the most-watched title on Disney+, with over 1.5 billion hours of viewing, and its 2024 animated sequel crossed $1 billion globally. From São Paulo to Jakarta, entertainment writers noted that the new version adds little beyond a single new Lin-Manuel Miranda song, “Along the Way,” and a few extra jokes from Jemaine Clement’s giant crab. “It’s the same doll with a cheap, added accessory,” one British reviewer wrote, invoking a Simpsons joke to describe what some see as algorithmic risk-aversion. In Sweden, the verdict was blunt: “a beautiful copy, but unnecessary.”

What the film does offer is a study in the limits of translation. The expressive, stylised ocean of the animation—a character in its own right—becomes, in live-action, a series of green-screen composites that, viewed from the Gulf, can feel “artificial.” The ghostly ancestors who once glided through printed Polynesian patterns now resemble, in the words of one London critic, “Haunted Mansion animatronics.” And yet, in the darkened auditoriums of Jakarta, audiences still gasped when Johnson’s Maui flexed his tattooed pectorals and launched into “You’re Welcome.” The bodysuit, for all its weight, could not smother the star’s charisma. As the credits rolled, the last image was not of the digital sea but of the actor peeling off the silicone shell, a demigod reduced to a man, the costume’s 40 pounds finally lifted.