Moana is the kind of film and female role model we need this year. She’s physically and emotionally strong, she speaks her mind, and she is a community leader. That’s a lot to achieve in 1 hour and 43 minutes! Moana is in good hands with the directing team that brought you “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” and “The Princess & the Frog” (Rob Clements and John Musker) with music by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Disney veteran Mark Mancina, and Opetaia Foa’i of Oceanic music group, Te Vaka. (Shout out to these men for writing a young, female character that relies on her own intuition and the mentorship of her grandmother to succeed. In other words, she don’t need no man.) 
As a baby, Moana is chosen by the ocean in a too-cute-for-words dance between the little Moana and the water, ending in her being offered the mystical heart stone of goddess Te Fiti. Her grandmother, the self-described “village crazy lady”, witnesses this magical exchange and keeps the stone that Moana drops until she is old enough to understand her duty.
Moana (newcomer Auli’i Cravalho) writes off the gift from the ocean as a childhood dream and spends much of her adolescence resisting the call of the sea, exacerbated by the fact that her father, the chief (Hamilton’s Christopher Jackson) forbids her from ever crossing the reef that surrounds their self-sustaining island home. That rule made a lot of sense before the island’s crops and natural resources begin rapidly depleting, and Moana is the only one brave enough to think big and act fast. Across the reef she goes.
With her grandmother’s guidance, Moana learns that her task is “simple:” find the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) and have him return the same mystical heart stone he stole to its rightful owner, the goddess Te Fiti, before the darkness of the millennia-old theft creeps onto Moana’s island and destroys the earth. SUPER easy for a young woman who’s never been allowed to leave home, right?! Wrong.
Our anti-princess leads the charge against hiccup after hiccup on her quest, with Maui and sidekick (a dim-witted chicken named Heihei– yep, Moana’s no chicken! She has a literal chicken to take that role) at her side. What impressed me most about this story was not Moana’s strengths but rather the depiction of her weaknesses. Moana is chock-full-a “imposter syndrome.” She decides to blindly trust the ocean and honor her grandmother’s wishes (*snaps*) without considering that she really has no idea what she’s doing and after several significant moments of crippling doubt, has to embrace experiential learning and trust herself or risk failure.
Of course, she doesn’t fail. The stone is returned, the Earth’s health is restored, Moana returns home to an enlightened family, and we all learned a little something about communication, taking risks, and acting for the greater good of mankind.
TL;DR
+20 for passing the Bechdel Test and encouraging a young, female leader to discover her identity and strengths
+20 for music by Lin Manuel Miranda
+10 for HeiHei the chicken
+10 for cultural repatriation (the heart stone to Te Fiti)
+20 for Dwayne Johnson (are we allowed to call him The Rock anymore?)’s comedic timing
+10 for Disney doing what it does best and knowing what pulls at our heart-strings
FINAL SCORE: +90 Solid A-