Moana 2 finally hits Disney+ this week. Its arrival marks the end of an arduous journey for a project that was originally planned to be a series on the streamer. Upon its release, the film received a lot of criticism. Some for its story; some for its music. Ahead of its release, our Editor-in-Chief Dempsey Pillot got the chance to sit down with the film’s composer – the legendary Mark Mancina – to talk about the latter.
In the interview, Mancina was very receptive to the criticism regarding the music. But he doesn’t take blame for it. After all, he calls the transition between working on the show before it became a movie “weird.”
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He explains that he had already been working on the show for quite some time, and had even completed some songs with Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, the film’s new co-composers.
“[I] worked on some songs with Emily and Abigail,” he says. “We worked on some concept cues but it was weird. [The way] everything was moving around, it just felt very strange.”
Mancina says that he found out in November of 2023 that Disney had changed its mind about the show and had begun the work to make it into a movie. And while he expected the studio to take its time to complete the project, he was astounded when he was told the following May that they were expected to crank out the music for a November 2024 release.
Having worked on other animated Disney classics like the original The Lion King and Tarzan, he says, “a lot of these animations take years to do the music. So it was very scary, daunting.” Fortunately, the work that he and the team did was not scrapped. Instead it was respectfully recycled.
He adds that he and another one of the composers he collaborated with on the film, Opetaia Foa’i, had written some music for certain scenes in the TV series that ended up being used for totally different scenes in the new movie, which “worked really well.”
In regards to Lin-Manuel Miranda not returning for the film, he says that it all came to down scheduling. Miranda had been contracted to do Mufasa and the show had already been announced as a series. He adds that he’s glad that Miranda got to take a step back because he didn’t want him to suffer the same social fate as another popular musician.
“It’s overexposure, he says. “As much as they love him…when you get overexposed, they start getting sick of you and they start criticizing you as they did Phil Collins.”
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But he adds that he’s glad that Miranda didn’t come back because the story required different voices.
“Lin writes really catchy, simple, great material. And I love it…[He] grew up listening to Brian Wilson, Beach Boys, listening to, uh, Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and all the other stuff he’s listened to – all the hip hop and everything. He has a background in that simple, catchy song. That’s four chords you can’t get it out of your head. I don’t think the girls have that background. To me, they have more of a classical background, more of a theatrical background. So their songs were much more layered, a little more complex.”
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He caps off his support of Abigail and Emily’s contributions by saying that the more mature songs match Moana’s more mature story.
In addition to chatting about the music, Mancina also discussed his involvement in the upcoming live-action adaptation of the first Moana. Aware that most of the redundant nature of Disney’s live-action reimaginings, he says that he “wants to do a little more with the score.”
“I’ve grown up a lot since doing the first Moana,” he explains. I would like to take this Moana [and] I don’t want to just copy the first movie, you know? I love the first movie. I love a lot about it..but I want to do a little more with the score. I was never as happy with that score as some other scores I’ve done. I’ve just grown. Now, I really feel like I’ve got a real feel of Moana and what the music is.”
He teases that fans should expect a “brand new score” in the live-action film.
But that’s not all. The Grammy award-winner concludes the chat with an additional tease for a third animated Moana film. While he says that he hasn’t been contacted, he did confirm that he received a mysterious email since the film wrapped production…
“One of the guys that worked on the film sent me an email and all it said was ‘Moana 3,’” he says. So, I don’t know, because I don’t run that company, but I would imagine they’re thinking about it.”
Be sure to listen to the full interview below!
Moana 2 is streaming exclusively on Disney+ now!
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