With its trailers provoking mockery and bemusement online and the original animation not even a decade old, hopes weren’t high for Disney’s live-action remake of Moana; it’s hard to shake the nagging feeling that this is a film that just isn’t needed. While the end product is far from the AI slop or filmic nightmare fuel that many feared, it loses so much magic in translation that it can be a spirit-sapping watch.

We’re once again in the company of plucky Moana (played by Catherine Laga’aia, taking over from voice star Auli’i Cravalho), who sets sail to save her dying Polynesian island home, despite the disapproval of her father Chief Tui (John Tui). To put things right, she must restore the heart of the goddess of nature, Te Fiti, which was stolen by shapeshifting demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson, appearing in person this time). Moana is egged on by her rebellious Gramma Tala (Rena Owen) and accompanied on her journey by pet rooster Heihei, befriending the arrogant and irritating Maui along the way and securing his help with her quest.

As one of Disney’s most beloved and popular properties, Moana should be handled with more care. The stunning 2016 original has already suffered a sub-par but lucrative sequel, released two years ago (which was repurposed from a shelved series), but that at least added new material and advanced the story.

Theatre director Thomas Kail makes his narrative feature debut here, and him and his collaborators (including original screenwriter Jared Bush and new co-writer Dana Ledoux Miller) fail to distinguish this remake in any discernible way, resulting in a near-identical but somehow significantly inferior copy that maroons its humans in soulless computer-generated landscapes.

The songs and story remain fundamentally strong, indeed Moana features one of the most striking soundtracks in Disney musical history. Yet it’s dispiriting how adding flesh and blood performers to the mix has resulted in such a lacklustre retelling, leaving you grasping for your memory of how much the original moved you, instead of this reimagining going for the emotional jugular and eliciting these reactions itself.

That’s less a slight on the actors in question and more the consequence of them having to go through such familiar motions, with Johnson saddled with an embarrassing and distracting wig and his efforts feeling like a pale version of his previous performance. Newcomer Laga’aia fares better and gives an earnest and likeable turn that’s perhaps lacking a little spark, while Owen’s twinkly, charismatic work as the mischievous Gramma Tala (she’s replacing Rachel House) is a winner.

There’s little value in seeing computer-generated animation transformed into computer-generated ‘live-action’, particularly given the highly fantastical nature of so many of the sequences, from Moana’s encounter with coconut pirates and a giant treasure-obsessed crab (voiced again by Jemaine Clement) to scenes featuring Te Fiti and volcanic demon Te Kā.

Original composer Mark Mancina and songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda are back on board for the music, with Miranda providing a new song that’s inconsequentially tacked onto the end credits. Titled ‘Along the Way’, it’s an affable number, very sweetly sung by Laga’aia and original Moana actress Cravalho, but slightly tanked by a terrible rap from Johnson.

Disney’s live-action remakes have been a distinctly mixed bag but origin story Cruella had fun by taking things in a completely different direction and last year’s phenomenally successful Lilo & Stitch remake won audiences over by adding enough askew humour of its own.

Unfortunately, Moana’s desperately unambitious approach is its undoing, it’s a tale of great courage told with creative cowardice, that’s so in thrall to the masterful, much too recent original it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a financially motivated facsimile.

Moana is released in UK cinemas on Friday 10 July.

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