How lovely it is to spend some time in Moana’s world. The film’s directors (there are four) and a prodigious fleet of animators have rendered a sparkling South Pacific, all jewel-tone ocean and lush, almost erotically green islands. You want to dive into it, revel in the luxurious beauty of it, especially when things in the real world are so gray and scary and disappointing. This is, of course, the transporting core power of a Disney animated film: a dizzying and enveloping prettiness. And if it’s a musical—in this case featuring songs by the lauded generator of American uplift Lin-Manuel Miranda—then it has an even more potent persuasiveness, going far to mask a story that may not be all that thrilling or inspired.

Which isn’t to say that Moana, about a Polynesian princess (of a sort) going on a great ocean voyage to save her people, isn’t narratively compelling. It is, enough. It’s just that the story housed in all this staggering beauty can’t quite live up to those aesthetics, though I’m not sure what could. Moana also has a supposed righteousness to it, in that it’s voiced by a host of actors who are themselves Pacific Islanders, or descendants of, including a spirited lead performance from Auli’i Cravalho, who gives Moana a bright, piquant tenacity. Disney also worked carefully to manage cultural sensitivities during production. There are still, however, people who say that the film is broad and exploitative, presenting a comforting, tourist-friendly amalgam of a vast and often troubled geographic and sociological region—so Moana’s niceness may not be as nice as it initially seems.

Amidst all the sun-dappled shores and gleaming waters, there’s a blinding glint of something cold and corporate in the film. With her island succumbing to a creeping darkness let loose a thousand years ago, Moana sets out across the sea to track down Maui, a trickster-adventurer demigod who stole the heart of Te Fiti—an island earth-mother entity—and in so doing created this whole mess. Maui, voiced with cheesy pluck by Dwayne Johnson, is a hulking, tattooed, long-maned blusterer, armed with a magical fish hook that gives him the ability to transform into any animal he chooses. (His preferred mode is a screeching hawk.) For just $25, the Maui-obsessed little kid in your life can own their very own enchanted fish hook, which lights up—though sadly probably cannot transform your child into a whale or a beetle.

The Maui of myth had a signature fish hook, so it’s not as if Disney invented a toy idea out of whole cloth. But in the film, Maui’s mighty implement vibrates with merchandising cynicism, as so much does in the film: the cute pig and funny chicken sidekicks are plush dolls made animate, the color palette designed for branded clothing. This is nothing new for Disney, a company whose calculating genius for synergy is the envy of many in the corporate world. But there’s something especially tinny and packaged about Moana, gorgeous as it is to look at, bouncy as its humor may be. It doesn’t help that Miranda’s songs, which he wrote with Opetaia Foa'i and Mark Mancina, are largely un-catchy, but nonetheless have a sort of Frozen schematic to them—there’s a “Let It Go” just when you expect there to be one. Watching Moana, you don’t feel giddy about there being another Disney princess to install in the canon so much as you question the very nature of the princess film.

That’s no knock on Moana as a character, or Cravalho’s entirely winning performance. It’s just that Moana feels so shaped by so many hands, so caressed into a perfect, palatable form that even all its wit and inventiveness—and there is plenty of that, from Maui’s anthropomorphized tattoos to that wacky chicken—seems canned. I’m not the target audience for this kind of movie, certainly, so maybe I’m missing something. But in a year when Disney also put out the smart, wonderful Zootopia, with its more daring themes and more complicated plotting, it’s hard not to see Moana as easy regression. Can a movie be both charming and charmless? If so, Moana is that.

Still, I got plenty of chills as Moana set off on her journey, bounding over the main, a song in her heart, a grand adventure sprawling out before her. Aren’t we all, at this point, programmed to be suckers for this kind of thing? And Moana is admirably careful not to fall into some familiar traps. Most crucially, there is no love interest for this teen heroine, no insistence that real fulfillment is to be found in some dopey boy. Which is good. Moana, with its four directors and six writers (though, interestingly, only Zootopia’s Jared Bush gets full writing credit), has plenty of good ideas, plenty of lively intuition. Moana will be a big, happy hit, and I’ll forever want to live in its glorious and vibrant environs. But hard as she may paddle, Moana can’t quite get past the cluttered reef of merch and other branded interests that keeps her film penned in.