‘Moana 2’: Read The Screenplay For Disney’s Record-Breaking Animated Sequel

deadline.com:

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.