Ten years ago, Moana sent an impetuous chief's daughter past the reef to find a disgraced demigod and set the ocean right again. Auli'i Cravalho voiced the title role in her first ever screen performance, opposite Dwayne Johnson's Maui, with songs from a not-yet-ubiquitous Lin-Manuel Miranda.
What set the production apart was how early Disney brought in an Oceanic Story Trust, a group of Pacific historians and cultural advisors who checked the script, the mythology and the character designs as the film evolved through nine versions. Their notes reshaped it more than once: an early version of Maui was drawn bald, and the Trust pushed until he got the long hair and tattoos audiences know now, and a scene built around Moana throwing a tantrum with coconuts was cut after they flagged it as culturally off.
The film earned Oscar nominations for best animated feature and for How Far I'll Go, and it still holds a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes a decade on. The animation has aged better than most mid-2010s Disney, mostly because the water was treated as its own character rather than a backdrop for everything else.
The timing of this anniversary is pointed: 2026 is also the year Disney sent Moana back out as a live-action musical, with Thomas Kail directing and Johnson returning to play the role in person rather than just voicing it, alongside Catherine Laga'aia in the title role. Watching the two side by side makes the case for the original rather than against it, since the hand-built mythology and the songs never needed a remake to prove they worked.
