At sea: "Moana 2"

The sight of cinemas overflowing with folks of all ages as Christmas approaches is pretty cheering. It would more cheering still if so much of the business being conducted therein weren't such a grubby cashgrab. Wicked: Part 1 is one half of a movie we're being invited to pay for again in twelve months; Moana 2 turns out to be showing in 3D, which everybody bar James Cameron has long since conceded is a bill of goods, and which is especially rich given that Disney's latest was originally greenlit as a straight-to-streaming TV series. (Perhaps this is the last avenue our increasingly desperate corporate entertainments have left to them: pickpocketing.) Anyway, once you've sourced an old pair of glasses from the back of the downstairs drawer of stuff and forked over the 3D surcharge to cover all the family, you can settle back, relax and peer through greasy lenses at a dingier reprise of a film that has, in the years since 2016, staked a serious claim to being the strongest Disney animation this side of the millennium, the thinking person's Frozen. (Setting aside my outlier affection for 2000's gags-for-gags'-sake The Emperor's New Groove, I can't think of any better New Disney.) I say dingier, because even the sequences in Moana 2 that take place at high noon fall subject to 3D's perpetual dusk. (A simple experiment: drag your glasses down your nose from time to time, and notice how bright the image on screen is, compared to what you're actually watching.) Nevertheless, it's clear these animators - under the direction of Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David G. Derrick Jr., the latter a holdover from the planned series - have been given carte blanche to push the visuals far beyond the scope of the first movie. Those once-colourful skies are now truly hallucinogenic, the prevailing idea of Pacific dreamtime only more surreal, and we tumble through worlds within worlds within worlds. Here is the best family film of the season to smuggle gummies of the non-pick-'n'-mix variety into. Here is also a pretty formidable demonstration of the power of the processor chip, its ability to convert what were originally smaller-screen imaginings into fully cinematic visions.

It's good we have such wonders to goggle at for ninety-odd minutes, because what we're listening to and trying to engage with on a narrative level proves far less impressive. The first movie sent its heroine on a life-or-death mission to expand the horizons of her people. The second merely wonders what to do with her for an hour and a half. Actually, that's a little unfair: after a half-hour of chewy exposition (something something uniting a people something), homilies about choosing who we are and endless visitations from ghosts and gods, a decision is reached to set Moana afloat anew, this time with a clutch of supporting characters, and then see what drifts into view. The script is as episodic as TV in its construction, which scans, although some of these episodes are rather enjoyable: an encounter with some unusually aggressive coconuts, a Verne-ish voyage to the bottom of the sea, a duel with cyclones. Moana 2 may actually have some of The Emperor's New Groove's devil-may-care looseness in its DNA, which is no bad thing, but too much of it feels goofy and temporary rather than mythic in any affecting and lasting way; the difference between the first film and this is that between first-wave Star Wars and the TV spinoffs being knocked out forty years on. It's great that the animation is this fluid, so a man who is also a god (with tattoos that move!) can turn first into a shark and then a bird of prey. Narratively, however, Moana 2 makes landfall as somewhere between hazy and vaporous, a light mizzle, where its predecessor was properly oceanic and engulfing. The songs are tuneful enough, though the absence of Lin-Manuel Miranda this time means there's nothing to match "How Far I'll Go", the "Defying Gravity" of 2016. Instead, we're offered echoes of past excellence - literally so when the hear-me-roar declaration "I am Moana" recurs at the climax of new song "Beyond" - and a showtune called "Get Lost" that sounds a decidedly self-reflexive note. I had reasonable fun sat before Moana 2, but - beyond a certain point - I honestly couldn't tell you what was going on, save an elevated form of doodling, a most spectacular data leak.

Moana 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.