I had a few problems with this movie...

So I finally watched 'Moana' last weekend, and here are my thoughts.

The animation was gorgeous. The idea was pretty good.

The execution, though...so many things either didn't make sense or were left hanging and didn't attach to anything.

For instance...the whole "Moana's father forbids her to go into the water" obstacle. It felt forced and ridiculous. They live on an ISLAND. It's totally unrealistic to expect that Moana isn't going to go into the water. Apparently nobody else ever goes into the water either, because we don't see anybody swimming or splashing around or anything, which makes NO sense. Everybody would be going into the water all the time. If you're scared of people drowning, how about you just, I don't know, maybe teach them how to swim?

And come to think of it, how does Moana know how to swim if she's never been in the water?

The reasoning behind why Moana's father doesn't want her to go near the water also sounds contrived. He lost his best friend to drowning, that's why. Again, they live on an ISLAND. Reasonably, one would think that what would happen is that the islanders would learn at a young age how to swim, and accept that because they live on an island, every once in a while someone is going to drown. Moana's father's buddy was an adult, and they were doing a dumb thing. If her father is a good chief, you'd think he'd realize that his buddy's death was due to carelessness and not because ZOMG WATER BAD! AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!!!

I would have set it up that Moana goes into the water all the time, but her father forbids her from going BEYOND THE REEF because it's dangerous. That makes sense, it doesn't make her father look like an idiot, and it ties into what Maui did (it's dangerous because of the sea monsters Maui unleashed.) Speaking of which...

It's never really explained how what Maui did ties into the rest of the story. For one thing we're never told exactly when in the timeline he stole Te Fiti's heart. Was it a thousand years ago? A hundred? Ten? In the beginning of the story it's told as an ancient fable, but then we discover that the 'blackness' is only just now reaching the island, and would that really take thousands of years? Also, obviously it wasn't happening when the voyagers first reached the island, so when was it? The boats are still seaworthy and haven't rotted, so it couldn't have been more than, say, 50 years. So that timeline is all messed up.

Someone on another message boards asked, if the water loves Moana so much, why does it keep trying to kill her? That's a good question, and another one that the movie doesn't answer.

The whole story feels episodic and like nothing connects to each other. We never see what happens on the island after Moana leaves it, and only at the end see everything on the island going from shrivelled-up black to nice and healthy again. But what does that mean? Was the island dying? What happened to the villagers during this time? It would have helped create a sense of urgency to have a scene or two where we see what's going on and Moana's family reacting to her being gone and the crops failing.

The whole thing with the crab seemed arbitrary and random. The song wasn't very good and it just wasn't structured well. I think it was supposed to be funny, but it just came across as bizarre. I don't think that scene needed a song to emphasize what was going on.

Moana's father should have actually burned the boats, not just said he was going to. That would have added some real drama, and then have Moana save the one she sets sail on and at the end, have Te Fiti restore the rest of the fleet and have the magic water sail them back to the island with Moana. That would have worked better dramatically IMO.

The pig was darned cute and underutilized.

I'm a big fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda and want to see him get that PEGOT, but 'How Far I'll Go' wasn't an Oscar-worthy song. It didn't tell us anything about Moana we didn't already know and was not very memorable. He's got better songs inside of him, and I'm sure he'll win the Oscar someday for one of them. I thought "We Know the Way" was a better song.

If you think about it, Moana is exactly the same character at the end of the movie as she is at the beginning. She's not the one who changes, but rather it's her father and to a lesser extant, Maui, who have to learn the lessons. That's OK, but it basically reduces the movie to a 'puzzlebox' story, where the only goal of the protagonist is to solve a riddle or find their way out of a situation, and those are never as interesting as a story where the protagonist has to learn something or mature to solve whatever the problem is.

Bottom line (at least for me): it's a good movie, but its limitations prevent it from being a great one.