“Moana 2”, tasteless animated adventures in the Polynesian islands

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID

Eight years after the success of the first part, Vaiana, the legend of the end of the world (2016), Vaiana 2 was initially to take the form of a series intended for the Disney+ platform, before being reworked into a feature film for a theatrical release. Three years later, the Maori heroine became chief of her island, as well as an explorer respected by all. Questioned by her ancestors, she sets off on a journey across the seas to the borders of the Pacific islands.

Its mission: to restore the lost unity between all these oceanic archipelagos, separated from each other since a power-hungry god divided them to better reign. The adventurer embarks with her acolytes (her little sister, a demigod, a cute pig and a funny chicken), heading for the lost island of Motoufetou, towards which all maritime routes converged before she was swallowed up by a storm.

Nothing new under the azure blue sky of Vaianawhich continues in its harmless and politically salubrious vein, as if the studio never stops making us forget decades of sleeping princesses. Moana or the warrior heroine, who has no time for a charming prince. She is not white but Polynesian, and the film once again draws on extensive documentation of the Maori people: their beliefs, their customs, their nature. Sincere repentance and homage to a people never represented in majority fiction? Or a way of saying that Disney is able to cannibalize the slightest culture that tries to escape it? We’ll let the viewer decide.

An audiovisual daycare

There remains the cartoon itself, of a perfectly algorithmic flatness, always concocting the same recipe: story of emancipation aimed at little girls (this abstract entity which justifies all the sentimentality), secondary characters selling off their stock of cute gags , serial perils and very quickly overcome (the serial matrix is ​​still felt), musical moments of a blandness rarely achieved.

The 3D animation plunges us head first into a bag of candy: tangy brilliance of colors, hyperrealistic work of textures (the soft, the sticky, the hairy, the soft). Everything is round here, reassuring in its total absence of risk-taking. So, Vaiana 2 can be viewed on a large screen as well as on a smartphone: it’s about capturing children’s attention, keeping them busy without ever reaching them, in short, an audiovisual daycare.

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