Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Moana 2, Disney’s wave-making sequel that arrived the day before Thanksgiving at the box office and hasn’t dropped anchor since.
Opening up a week after Wicked and Gladiator II were released, the animated sequel adventure has now totaled $717 million at the worldwide box office, split $337.5M domestically and $379.5M internationally. It also just picked up a Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Move.
The film, written by Jared Bush and co-director Dana Ledoux Miller, was originally set to be a Disney TV series. The story takes place three years after the events of the first Moana, which made a successful splash in 2016, scoring Oscar nominations in Animated Feature and Original Song for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “How Far I’ll Go.”
The original film followed the young heroine (voiced by Auli‘I Cravalho) as she went beyond the boundaries of her island home to confront the demigod Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) and demand that he return the heart of Te Fiti, which he had stolen, throwing the environment off balance. Moana 2 follows Moana, now a wayfinder or Tautai, as she is tasked with reuniting the separated island communities in Oceania, who were broken apart by the storm god Nalo. Nalo gained power from isolating the various islands and burying the island of Motufetū, which served as the central meeting point for all the Pacific Island leaders. The channels and currents from their homes met there.
“There are old stories within the Pacific of meeting points for navigators from different islands,” Miller says. “We were inspired by that idea that people would travel to find each other — we imagined that, generations ago, many channels of the ocean led to one island, enabling wayfinders from across the ocean to come together to learn from each other through shared experiences.”
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The filmmakers enlisted the help of a group of advisors known as the Oceanic Cultural Trust to aid in accurate representation of Pacific Island nations. Among those in the group are cultural anthropologists, master tattooists, linguists, geographers, historians and choreographers from Somoa, Tonga, Tahiti and the Solomon Islands, as well as Native Hawaiian deep-sea navigators.
Bush, Disney Animation chief creative officer, wanted the focus of the sequel to be on Moana continuing to discover her identity. The journey of self-discovery also featured new faces: Moana’s younger sister Simea (voiced by Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), scribe and archivist Moni (Hualālai Chung), engineer Loto (Rose Matafeo), agriculturist Kele (David Fane), demigoddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser) and more.
The film also features music written by the Grammy-winning duo Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear as well as Opetaia Foa‘I and Grammy winner Mark Mancina. Barlow and Bear had the opening number, “We’re Back”, ready to go before their first meeting, while “Beyond” made the Oscar shortlist for Original Song.
Check out the script below.