ʻAuē, ʻauē, Moana Sings in Samoan and Talks Like California

Ten years after the animated original, Disney has put a live-action Moana into cinemas on 10 July 2026. Thomas Kail directs, holding onto the 2016 screenplay of Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller and Mark Mancina's score, with one fresh Lin-Manuel Miranda song called Along the Way. In the lead, Catherine Lagaʻaia, a nineteen-year-old of Samoan descent from Sydney, plays the wayfinder. Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui, with the Māori actress Rena Owen (well-known in the Pacific for her role in the 1994 urban Māori film Once Were Warriors) as Gramma Tala. The linguistic question starts with which tongue actually gets spoken.

In practice, English fills the spoken lines almost throughout. The dialogue and the arguments unfold in it, from Motunui to the ocean floor. Chiefs and parents trade their lines in a brisk contemporary English, complete with a daring "Son of a b*tch" split line between the two main characters. Even the villagers' council over the dying reef plays out in that idiom. Across the songs, Polynesian words surface in only a handful of numbers. Moana herself utters a lone Samoan sentence late in the story. Maui gives little more. For long stretches, a listener could forget the Polynesian setting entirely.

Across her own songs, Moana sings in English too. Her longing and her courage arrive in the audience's language, voiced by How Far I'll Go and its reprises. Driving the whole plot, that wanting never surfaces in an island tongue. Yet the communal songs of voyaging hold onto their Pacific words. Even her farewell to her grandmother unfolds in English. Only when the village lifts its collective voice does the film cross into Samoan and Tokelauan.

That one Samoan sentence is squeezed in near the climax, as Moana claims her name and her calling. For a beat the heroine speaks the tongue of her ancestors, while the film lets the moment breathe. The choice carries real charge, though it also exposes the imbalance. Held back for a lone sentence, a whole people's language plays the part of a garnish on an English-run plot. The scene stirs an audience because such Pacific speech stays rare across the rest of the runtime.

Inside that anthem, the island tongues do the emotional lifting. We Know the Way opens in Samoan and lifts its chorus into Tokelauan. Only the closing lines turn to English. Written first in Tokelauan by Opetaia Foaʻi of the group Te Vaka, the piece draws on island pictures of the ocean as a road home. The chorus names the guiding stars and the wind at a canoe's back. In seating the melody in a tongue of a few thousand speakers, Foaʻi knew that overseas versions would translate the English and leave the islander verses in place.

Beneath the film's gentlest moment lies a fonder truth-grounded Pacific history. The lullaby greeting the toddler Moana, titled An Innocent Warrior, began as Loimata e Maligi, a Te Vaka song in Tuvaluan. In memory of the nineteen teenage girls who died in the 2000 Motufoua School dormitory fire caused by a candle a student used to read at night, Foaʻi first wrote the song Loimata e maligi ("tears running down") for Tuvalu. Reshaping the words for the screen, he kept the melody's older mourning. The lost girls of Motufoua stay present whenever islanders hear that tune. Vai Mahina sings the film vocal. At the fiery clash with the lava demon, the melody returns.

Still, for all its budget, the remake takes few musical risks. It brings back the 2016 songbook almost whole and adds a lone new number, leaning on a decade-old catalogue instead of commissioning fresh island-tongue writing. The 2024 sequel had already recycled much of the palette. In review after review, critics dismissed the result as a hollow retread, one calling it a worse telling of a familiar tune. From a linguistic view, the shortfall stings twice. The one addition, Along the Way, rolls out in English.

On cultural fidelity, the film leans on a composite: Disney built Motunui as a pan-Pacific blend, mixing Samoan and Tahitian influence with strands of other Pacific island cultures. For a broad audience, the blend feels like a warm, recognisable Polynesia, though it answers to no living nation's grammar. The invented place-names sound Polynesian and match no atlas. Faulted once for flattening separate peoples into one ocean backdrop, the original set a pattern while the remake inherits the habit whole.

In the mouths of the elders, the English turns dignified. Gramma Tala tells Moana the voice inside is who she is, a blessing to steady her mokopuna. In the wayfinding lesson, the craft comes down to knowing where a voyager finds herself on the ocean by knowing where she has already been. Such lines honour the Pacific without stiffening into a museum piece. Without theatrics, the elders' speeches about ancestry and duty weigh all their worth.

In Maui's mouth, the tone lurches into contemporary America. The demigod talks in self-help pep and wrestling-promo swagger, tossing off lines like "nania business" and a breezy time to bounce. Nearby, Tamatoa the treasure-hoarding crab struts through a glam-rock cabaret far from any real lagoon. A Burbank writers' room chasing laughs made these calls. Children giggle. For a Pacific ear, the gap between the two levels of speech can feel like two films spliced together.

Now, instead of trusting its cast to keep their own accents, the film irons them toward one tentative American voice. Lagaʻaia grew up in Sydney and speaks with a form of Australian lilt. Owen originally has a New Zealand English, with elements of Māori phonetics. Given their work, with American studios, both see their accents drift toward a composite American English, where the rhotic feature emerges. On screen, a Sydney vowel or an Auckland turn of phrase would have grounded the film in a real corner of the ocean.

Even so, one casting choice looks like real progress. Auliʻi Cravalho, the original voice of Moana, stepped aside from the live-action lead to let another Pacific Islander embrace it, staying on as an executive producer. Yet heritage and fluency are two different matters. Raised abroad, performers of Samoan descent know the culture through family and media, Pacific festivals with the island tongue as a second language of uneven strength. The point applies to Johnson too. It casts no shade on them, though it does thin any claim of authenticity won by casting alone.

By contrast, another Pacific production shows a bolder path. Jason Momoa's series Chief of War, an eighteenth-century Hawaiian epic, plays almost fully in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, with subtitles. Fluency supervisors coached the actors line by line. Only a fifth of that cast spoke the tongue at the start. The cast drilled the language for months, earning the right to speak it on camera. Moana chose the softer option, tucking its islands into a soundtrack while the players on screen go with English only.

Set against the 2016 film, this Moana banks on its reflavoured soundtrack anthology but stalls on its speech. The Foaʻi and Mancina songs still do the cultural heavy lifting, unchanged in a decade. On the spoken word, the remake adds no fresh island writing and doubles down on English. In development already, a third animated film has Bush and Ledoux Miller returning to script it. ʻAuē, ʻauē, nuʻu i mua! ʻO loʻo mātou saʻilia se ʻāiga fōu mō tātou?