You know a movie is adrift when you spend the running time admiring the grooming. As in the animated 2016 "Moana," a Polynesian teenager (Catherine Laga'aia) sets sail to save her starving people by returning a heart stone to an island spirit. The plucky girl goes off into the breach with a cocky demigod named Maui (Dwayne Johnson) in a catamaran that continually pitches them into the waves, soaking them both so often that the hair and costume teams do an impressive job calibrating whether each scene's look should be drenched, damp or sun-baked. Yes, the most riveting thing about director Thomas Kail's live-action "Moana" is watching painted cloth dry.

Every one of Disney's remakes and spinoffs of its animated hits has been a naked cash grab. None have measured up to their source material, although Lin-Manuel Miranda's music in the 2024 prequel "Mufasa: The Lion King" contributed the best ditties to the studio's songbook in decades.

Miranda writes another good track here but holds it back for the closing credits as it's fan service that doesn't fit into the plot. In case you don't make it to the end, "Along the Way" is a duet between Laga'aia's sunny new Moana and her predecessor, Auli'i Cravalho, who voiced the original character. Their harmonies intertwine like two gulls in flight. Underneath, Johnson spits guttural injections like he's auditioning for the Atlanta rap group Migos. It's odd and discordant with a strange magic all its own — a blessing in what's otherwise a lame remix.

The futile paradox of these so-called live-action adaptations is they require a tsunami of pixels to surround actual human performers with everything audiences adored the first time. The results are wonky. Wacky animal sidekicks once felt vibrant in a holistic world of artifice; here, a goggle-eyed rooster just looks diseased. Cartoons ask people to choose to give themselves over to fantasy. These redos strip it away.

"Moana" bears this burden heavily because nearly every shot makes you aware that Laga'aia is clearly surrounded by a green screen clutching an oar while a wind machine blows in her face. Kail, the Tony Award-winning theater director of "Hamilton" making his narrative feature debut, doesn't yet have the assurance to insist on his own grand visuals. Instead, he shoots nearly all the film in close-ups with fuzzy backgrounds. Perhaps it's impractical to do full-body action shots of barefoot people scampering around a rustic deck. The ocean scenery is fake; the wooden splinters are real.

Nevertheless, the claustrophobic framing shrinks an epic voyage into small-screen content made solely for a bored child to hold right up to their nose. That thunder you hear rumbling is Walt Disney yelling down: What's the point?

Animation's expressiveness can't be captured by mortals, even one as formidable as Johnson, who so enjoys his trickster Maui that he's played him three times in 10 years. The proximity of "Moana 2," released in the fall of 2024, adds to the fatigue. As drawn, Maui is broader than he is tall. To achieve a similar impact, Johnson appears to be wearing a muscular silicone suit over his 6-foot-5 frame, but the extra padding just makes his head look puny. (For vanity's sake, he's also given Maui abs.) Johnson's carapace is detailed with skin-like textures, swollen bicep veins and living tattoos that offer him encouragement and advice. The uncanny valley is right between his pecs. We see so many intimate angles of them that I got distracted trying to find his nipples. The internet is convinced his Maui doesn't have any. I spotted one.

Most of the set pieces rush past in a blur. An armada of monster-pirates, the Kakamora — think coconut-flavored Gremlins — are a hectic horde with nice textures when the camera holds on them for longer than two seconds. Jemaine Clement's singing crab number, "Shiny," already a bizarre blend of funky bass and glam ballad vocals, comes with an assault of glitter and gold and nightclub lighting that, rather than electrify the audience, cows it into passivity. It's like being on a ketamine bender in Vegas.

You can count the number of memorable images on one starfish: a bioluminescent manta ray, a roiling lava goddess forever crusting over and losing her limbs, a mythological skyscape that reprises the Big Dipper as a gigantic fish hook. On a humbler scale, Kail poetically marks the passage of time with a thickening palm tree. But these are all previously animated ideas resurrected pretty much as we've already seen them. The only delightful new practical shot is when Johnson peels a banana with his teeth.

Kail hustles through the emotional beats like a tour guide muttering, "You know what happened here." Still, it's possible — with effort — to register the film's themes about duty, inheritance, courage and righteous disobedience. Rena Owen's twinkly grandmother gets one line of dialogue that's genuinely lovely: "There is nowhere you can go that I won't be with you," she assures the teenager, a promise that goes beyond the Pacific Ocean to the grave.

Laga'aia's Moana has a buoyant, likable optimism that mostly carries her through the fact that she doesn't get to do much besides grin inanely. I'm game to see her in something other than a live-action remake of "Moana 2." If this somehow sells enough tickets that she's enlisted to make another one, hopefully the sequel will find a better way to let the filmgoers vicariously feel like they're getting splashed with sea spray right where they sit. Or at least not spend a fortune sailing around and going nowhere.

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'MOANA'

MPA rating: PG (for action/peril, some scary images, rude humor and brief thematic elements)

Running time: 1:55

How to watch: In theaters July 10

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