Moana 2026: Dwayne Johnson, Catherine Laga’aia and Thomas Kail on the live-action remake

Hawaii has long been a destination for Hollywood movies and TV shows.

Its stunning natural beauty and overall vibe makes for production values you just can’t buy in most places.

But despite the plethora of projects that have filmed there, all those Elvis Presley movies, Jurassic Park, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The White Lotus, if you ask locals if there’s one Hollywood production they feel most represents them, almost everyone says the same thing: Moana.

Moana is not solely Hawaiian, rather it encapsulates a variety of Polynesian cultures, but the 2016 Disney animated feature carries such a strong legacy across the Pacific that many communities feel a kinship with the story of a teen girl who travels past the reef to save her people.

The original film has been a superstar since its release a decade earlier. It remains one of the most streamed movies on Disney’s streaming service and a middling sequel two years earlier soared to over $US1 billion off the back of that latent love.

But given the strength of that legacy for such a recent film, why remake it in live action so soon?

“What an opportunity to turn something that’s beloved into a live action,” Dwayne Johnson told The Nightly.

“What an opportunity to take our culture, our Polynesian culture, which spans a lot of islands and a lot of subcultures and put that up on the big screen in a really beautiful way.”

Johnson performed the voice of Maui, a recalcitrant demi-god who reluctantly aids Moana in her quest to return the mythical heart to the goddess Te Fiti, and returns in this Moana remake as the live-action version of Maui.

Now, he’s all rippling muscles, Fabio-esque curls and that same cheeky declaration of “boat snack!” as he eyes Moana’s chicken companion, HeiHei.

He’s joined on screen by Catherine Laga’aia, a Sydney teen who before this enormous role has only appeared in local series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

Johnson said plans for the remake started in 2019 around the time former Disney chief executive Bob Iger was about to leave the business the first time, and “I think his parting wish was live action Moana, so that got us going, when the boss says ‘let’s do it’”.

Johnson may have already played Maui in animated form, but even a trickster demi-god isn’t the same in live-action, that there had to be a “realness” to him. There had to be a modulation.

“In voice acting in an animated movie, your voice has to have a pulse and it has to come alive because that informs the animators,” he explained. “But with live-action, it’s real human beings. Flesh, blood, there’s life behind the eyes.

“With Moana and Maui in particular, I realised it right away when I got to set and you realise what this opportunity is, and really how cool it is.

“The thing that was different for me was getting used to the choreography and the singing and acting all at the same time. I just had not done that before, and I got used to that right away. Had to, right away.”

In a movie that goes into supernatural realms with giant singing crabs and a fearsome lava monster, director Thomas Kail, best known for directing the Broadway sensation Hamilton, said it was important to establish the emotional stakes in a realistic way.

That’s a different challenge in live-action than in animation where you’re immediately willing to suspend disbelief.

“This is a story that starts on an island that has to be real,” he said. “Our goal was to make it feel so real that you would look on a map for it, even though it’s a fictional place.

“We knew the more grounded it was, the more you were investing in the character, so then when Catherine is playing Moana in peril, the investment is very high.”

The time spent on Motunui among Moana’s family and community becomes more important than ever, as do all those small details in the production design.

The 2016 animation consulted widely and deeply with a trust that advised on every element of Pacific cultures, and this remake did too.

“We were blessed to have a cultural trust of practitioners at the highest order, making sure that everything that you see on screen feels like the real thing, and is the real thing,” Kail said.

“Everywhere you looked, you saw something true, and when you have actors who are after the truth and they’re connecting with something that is true, I think you can feel that.”

Laga’aia, whose father Jay Laga’aia, the well-known Australian performer, is Samoan, gave the example of the costumes as something that she really loved seeing come to life in live-action.

“They are these stunning, intricate things that don’t get as much appreciation as they should in animation, but in our film, Liz McGregor, our costume designer, makes these beautiful costumes that are so true to what they’re representing.”

Representation was a buzzword a few years back, certainly around the time of the animated original, but it’s something that is still central to this version. Being authentic in your storytelling has never gone out of vogue.

Which circles back to the question of why remake this movie, which is who are you making it for, who is the person, real or imagined, that would watch this and feel held, and therefore it was all worth it.

“Mine was always, I used to think of my very, very little cousins, and I still think about them,” Laga’aia said.

“But I also thought about the version of me that watched the first one. If I could watch it again now, or that nine-year-old kid could watch the live-action now, would I love it as much as I loved the animated one?

“Would it do the same for me that it did back then?”

For Johnson, the very select audience he wants to make happy spans generations.

“I would say, number one, the spirit of my grandfather who inspired the character of Maui, and he visits regularly, I always see these little signs of him,” he said.

“And if there is a 10-year-old boy in Samoa or New Zealand or in Fiji or in Tonga or Tahiti, wherever it is, and they’re looking up and they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s my uncle, that’s my grandpa, that’s my grandma, that’s me, that could be me’, there you go.

“Because I know when I was 10, I didn’t see myself on screen. So this is such a cool thing.

“I would love for our people, Polynesian people, not only Samoan, I am half-Black, half-Samoan, but all of our Polynesian cultures to be proud of the film we made when they go see it.

“To me, that answers the question of, ‘Oh, then we did it right, then I’m glad we made it’. It’s pride that we should have.”

Moana is in cinemas on July 9